Politics Literature Arts Ideas

History

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Europe’s Most Terrible Years

For Germans, World War II began with deceit and cruelty and ended in physical and moral desolation.

December 17, 2020 issue

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

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

An East India Company official, probably the Scottish surgeon William Fullerton of Rosemount, with attendants; painting by Dip Chand, circa 1760–1764

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

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

Jacqueline Woodson

‘The Tools We Have’: A Photo History of African Women

A new book offers a striking visual history of African women from 1870 to 1970.

January 23, 2021

Elizabeth Kolbert

Chemical Warfare’s Home Front

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

February 11, 2021 issue

Richard Kreitner

Secessionist Talk Is Serious

Disunion is hardly a new theme in American politics. In this moment of tumult, it would be unwise to rule out its return.

January 19, 2021

Peter Lowe

A World Without Us: Josef Koudelka’s ‘Ruins’

These photographs of ancient sites, taken around the Mediterranean between 1991 and 2015, are particularly apt in our time of isolation and upheaval.

January 16, 2021

Andrea Pitzer

Mission to the Frozen North

William Barents’s last Arctic voyage was destined to be not a triumph of navigation but a struggle to survive. Four centuries later, his dream of a Northeast Passage is a troubling reality.

January 5, 2021

Benjamin Moser

Sarajevo Revisited

Retracing my own steps to Bosnia, which were earlier in Susan Sontag’s footprints, I found the city still scarred yet inspiring in its affirmation of human dignity.

December 29, 2020