Politics Literature Arts Ideas

History

David W. Blight

An American Pogrom

Uncovering the truth about the 1898 massacre of black voters in Wilmington, North Carolina.

November 19, 2020 issue

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

Fires during the Haitian Revolution; engraving by Jean-Baptiste Chapuy, circa 1791

Fara Dabhoiwala

Speech and Slavery in the West Indies

Slavery was foundational to Britain’s prosperity and rise to global power.

August 20, 2020 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Our First Authoritarian Crackdown

Wendell Bird’s ‘Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798’

July 2, 2020 issue

Christopher de Bellaigue

The Pillage of India

William Dalrymple’s ‘The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire’ and Shashi Tharoor’s ‘Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India’

June 11, 2020 issue

‘The Battle of Bad Axe’; illustration by Henry Lewis, 1857. In Surviving Genocide, Jeffrey Ostler writes, ‘Toward the end of the 1832 Black Hawk War, a cannon aboard the US steamship Warrior fired on Sauks and Mesquakies trying to escape US troops by crossing the Mississippi River. What the image shows is clearly a massacre, but in an especially striking example of colonial evasion, the caption refers to the event as a battle.’

Peter Nabokov

The Intent Was Genocide

July 2, 2020 issue

A reunion of former slaves at the Cosmopolitan Baptist Church, Washington, D.C., 1917. From left to right, Lewis Martin, 100; Martha Elizabeth Banks, 104; Amy Ware, 103; and Reverend Simon P. Drew, who was born free.

James Oakes

An Unfinished Revolution

The ideological struggle to control the story of Reconstruction began at Appomattox.

December 5, 2019 issue

Workers removing a statute of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from Robert E. Lee Park (now Turtle Park), Dallas, Texas, September 2017

Michael Gorra

A Heritage of Evil

Three books dealing with memory and historical witness

November 7, 2019 issue

The Latest

Dubravka Ugresic

An Archaeology of Resistance

An army of unqualified historians is toiling today, erasing antifascist history and legitimizing revisionist versions.

November 16, 2020

Sara Lipton

Life, Death, and the Levys

A new book traces the twentieth-century scattering of a Sephardic family through five continents.

December 3, 2020 issue

Colin Thubron

Cartographers of Stone and Air

On Tim Robinson’s intensely focused survey of a small patch of the Irish landscape and Lyall Watson’s sweeping inquiry into the mysteries and mysticism of wind.

December 3, 2020 issue

Jenny Uglow

They Made London Their Own

A new book traces the multitudinous contributions of migrants to the capital, as well as their persistent exploitation.

December 3, 2020 issue

David Treuer

The Power Brokers

A recent history centers the Lakota and the vast territory they controlled in the story of the formation of the United States.

December 3, 2020 issue

Pankaj Mishra

Grand Illusions of the West

It’s time to abandon the intellectual narcissism of cold war Western liberalism.

November 19, 2020 issue

Valeria Luiselli

Things as They Are

Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.

November 19, 2020 issue