Ideas

History

How Brown Came North and Failed

The effort to desegregate Detroit’s public schools required not just the courts but a social movement that could speak effectively about the barriers that Black people faced before it could begin to seek redress.

May 29, 2025 issue

Nina Siegal

The Spy in the Jeu de Paume

The detailed information gathered by the French curator Rose Valland about the Nazis’ looting of artworks made it possible for the Allies to recover tens of thousands of them after World War II.

May 29, 2025 issue

Adam Hochschild

One Brief Shining Moment

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

May 29, 2025 issue

Sarah Haque

In Search of Almas Ali

My grandfather was an early activist in the struggle for a free Bangladesh. Why was he killed by the independence movement he helped found?

May 4, 2025

Alice Kaplan

Zionism Without Zion

Rachel Cockerell’s family saga shows that in the search for a Jewish homeland, Palestine was only one possible location.

May 29, 2025 issue

Francisco Cantú

Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration

The Afterlife Is Letting Go, Brandon Shimoda’s book about how survivors and descendants of the United States’ Japanese internment camps try to keep their families’ histories alive, is also a look at the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

April 24, 2025 issue

Jesse McCarthy

Return to My Native Land

Vincent O. Carter’s forgotten novel Such Sweet Thunder is a modernist masterpiece and a tribute to a lost black world of Kansas City.

April 24, 2025 issue

Vivian Gornick

The 176-Year Argument

At the University of Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College of New York all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?

April 24, 2025 issue

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Joan Didion

Clinton Agonistes

The Clinton impeachment was a situation in which a handful of people with something to gain (a book contract, a sinecure as a network “analyst,” or the justification of a failure to get either of the Clintons on Whitewater), managed to harness this phenomenon and ride it.

October 22, 1998 issue

Theodore H. Draper

Reagan’s Junta

“The implications of government by secret presidential junta strike at the very roots of the American system of government. One way to think about them is to note how the Iran-contra affair has been defended or rationalized by those politically or ideologically closest to the President.”

January 29, 1987 issue

I.F. Stone

A Special Supplement: Impeachment

There are two reasons for impeaching Richard Nixon. One is that this may be the only legal proceeding to determine the President’s complicity in the Watergate scandal. The other is that only so grave a step may deter a future President from such abuses.

June 28, 1973 issue

David S. Reynolds

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

December 16, 2021 issue

The Latest

Edna Bonhomme

‘Illness and Its Very Concept’

Surveying a century of political struggles over medicine and psychiatry, a recent book foregrounds a West German collective that sought to create a radical, patient-led form of health care.

May 2, 2025

Ingrid D. Rowland

Vitruvius & the Warlords

Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was not only a manual of the building arts but a treatise on how to extend and consolidate the Roman Empire, and lent itself all too well to the autocratic ambitions of Renaissance princes.

May 15, 2025 issue

Heather O’Donnell

Ambition, Discipline, Nerve

The qualities that enabled Belle da Costa Greene to cross the color line were the same ones that made her a formidable negotiator and collector for J. P. Morgan’s library, which she led for over twenty years.

May 15, 2025 issue

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Justice for Chagos?

Decades after the Indian Ocean island colony’s inhabitants were forcibly deported to accommodate an American military base, the ICJ has ruled that they be allowed to return. But is international law sufficient to bring them justice?

May 15, 2025 issue

Fara Dabhoiwala

Charting an Unheroic Past

With her densely textured, ambitious, and deeply collaborative scholarship, the historian Catherine Hall has transformed public discourse about slavery.

April 24, 2025 issue

Erin Maglaque

Vexed by Sex

A new history of how Christianity has met the problem of desire argues for more flexibility in proclamations on gender and sexuality.

April 24, 2025 issue

Francine Prose

Poisoning the Family Tree

Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium is an account of his search for information about his great-grandfather, a German Jewish scientist who helped develop chemical weapons for the Nazis.

April 24, 2025 issue

Benjamin Nathans

The Enigma of George Kennan

Frank Costigliola’s biography of George Kennan explores the contrast between the supreme confidence of his policy prescriptions and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life.

April 24, 2025 issue