History

Brazil at the Crossroads

Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.

February 23, 2023 issue

Hermione Lee

The Soft-Power Brokers

A new history focusing on the English Rothschilds tells how the women were centrally involved in business, politics, social welfare, and culture—all while caught between the advantages of wealth and the burdens of anti-Semitism and sexism.

February 23, 2023 issue

T.H. Breen

Commanders and Courtiers

The Howe family achieved an influential position of power in late-eighteenth-century Britain, propelled by the shrewd social intelligence of the Howe women.

February 23, 2023 issue

Timothy Garton Ash

Ukraine in Our Future

Ukraine faces extraordinary challenges, but it also presents a challenge for Europe—and a great opportunity.

February 23, 2023 issue

Ian Frazier

Grim Reapers

Mega-agriculture is destroying the Corn Belt and the Central Valley, which the country’s food system depends on. Can midsize farms survive to save it?

February 9, 2023 issue

Fred Kaplan

Putin’s Miscalculation

After two decades of reforming its armed forces, Russia expected a lightning victory in Ukraine, but the ill-starred invasion has revealed their deficiencies.

February 9, 2023 issue

Saidiya Hartman

The Hold of Slavery

In the archive of slavery, I encountered a paradox: the recognition of the slave’s humanity and status as a subject extended and intensified servitude and dispossession.

October 24, 2022

Nawal Arjini

Democracy in Concrete

An exhibition of postcolonial architecture in South Asia looks back with nostalgia at modernism’s promise of social progress.

June 26, 2022

Great Lives

Marie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792

Lynn Hunt

Marie Antoinette: Why Was She So Hated?

How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy.

November 5, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

October 8, 2020 issue

Michael Gorra

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

February 27, 2020 issue

The Latest

James Fenton

Here’s Looking at Yew

In the English garden, eccentricity and variety went hand in hand.

April 6, 2023 issue

Anna Della Subin

A Body That’s Divine

A recent book catalogs the Old Testament’s physical descriptions of God, who ate, probably drank, got mistaken for an ordinary man, and was likely circumcised.

April 6, 2023 issue

Phillip Lopate

Drowned Worlds

In Nineteen Reservoirs, her study of New York City’s upstate water supply, Lucy Sante explores how a more or less effaced past continues to haunt the march of progress.

April 6, 2023 issue

Eric Foner

A Regional Reign of Terror

Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the lesser known brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.

April 6, 2023 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

An Exceptional Witness

The Holocaust survivor Stella Levi recalls growing up in the Jewish community of Rhodes before its destruction by the Nazis.

April 6, 2023 issue

Susan Neiman

Longing for Reconciliation

The philosopher Jacob Taubes was torn between the desire to heal the split between Judaism and Christianity— particularly between Germans and Jews—and his doubts that it was possible.

April 6, 2023 issue

Scott W. Stern

The Lost Promise of Environmental Rights

Fifty years ago, working-class activists tried to make courts and legislatures affirm rights to clean air and water. Today that strategy is on the verge of a comeback.

March 15, 2023

Carey Baraka

The Political Education of William Ruto

Kenya’s new leadership got their start in the 1980s in the youth ranks of Daniel arap Moi’s authoritarian regime. Will they repeat the sins of their mentors?

March 8, 2023