History

The Forgotten Crime of War Itself

In his new book, Samuel Moyn argues that efforts to humanize war with smarter weaponry or sanctify it with moral cant have obscured the task of making peace the first goal of foreign policy.

April 21, 2022 issue

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

An Unexpectedly Modern Monarch

Despite his mundane outlook and stiff conventionality, George V may have ensured the survival of the British monarchy in a turbulent century.

April 7, 2022 issue

Ariel Dorfman

The Futility of Censorship

Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas focuses on heroes and heroines who refused to allow their freedom of expression to be extinguished.

April 7, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’?

A new feminist history asks us to reconsider early modern queenship.

April 21, 2022 issue

Molly Crabapple

The Joy of Yiddish Books

The language sustained a Jewish diasporan secular culture, from Vilna to the Lower East Side. Today, that heritage survives in a gritty corner of Queens to be claimed by a new generation.

February 26, 2022

Emily Raboteau

The Stories of the Bronx

How did the South Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s come to symbolize slumdom all over the world when its problems could be found in any other deindustrializing American city?

April 7, 2022 issue

J. Hoberman

Framing Babyn Yar

Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries, sourced from archival propaganda, have drawn criticism for what they do not show.

March 29, 2022

Ishion Hutchinson

The Noble Fish

No traces exist to point me to my African origin, but I knew that the sea around Senegal’s coast constituted a leg of the Middle Passage.

February 9, 2022

The Latest

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

Duncan Hosie

The Remaking of the Second Amendment

The Supreme Court’s expanding interpretation of the Second Amendment threatens longstanding democratic authority to enact gun safety measures.

June 10, 2022

James Mann

The Birchers & the Trumpers

A new biography of Robert Welch traces the origins and history of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era.

June 23, 2022 issue

Keith Thomas

A ‘Puritan Jihadi’

Oliver Cromwell’s cruelty and fervent, born-again religiosity were extreme, even by the standards of the age.

June 23, 2022 issue

Andrew Delbanco

Endowed by Slavery

The history of university coffers suggests a centuries-long conversion of blood money into benefactions.

June 23, 2022 issue

Marina Warner

Wimple Networks

The scholars in Relations of Power argue that a method borrowed from literary criticism can shift our historical understanding of medieval women’s spheres of influence.

June 23, 2022 issue

Larry Rohter

An Eternal Symbol of Black Resistance

Gayl Jones’s novel Palmares sees the legendary Brazilian slave haven as a story to which all descendants of Africans brought forcibly to the Americas can lay claim.

June 23, 2022 issue

Lynn Hunt

I, the People

Was Robespierre proof that violent revolution in the name of rights and social justice could only result in terror and authoritarianism?

June 23, 2022 issue

Christopher Alessandrini

Occasional Residences of the Gods

The artist Gala Porras-Kim has become an eloquent advocate for sacred objects in ethnographic collections. Will museums listen?

June 1, 2022

Paisley Currah

What Sex Does

For transgender people in the United States, the sheer number of institutions with discrete authority to define sex ensnares us in Kafkaesque contradictions.

May 27, 2022