History

The Creation of Nigeria

Britain’s consolidation of Nigeria as a single colony has been the source of most of the major political conflicts that have roiled the country since independence.

June 8, 2023 issue

Erin Maglaque

Unwanted Thoughts

Robin Vose’s new history of the Index of Prohibited Books shows how Catholic censorship was, despite its totalizing ambitions, often incoherent and contradictory.

June 8, 2023 issue

David W. Blight

The Two Constitutions

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

June 8, 2023 issue

Thomas Powers

Getting Sacagawea Right

New evidence suggests that Sacagawea had a longer life than most historians have believed—fifty-seven years longer.

June 8, 2023 issue

Brenda Wineapple

At Odds with Two Worlds

Susanna Moore writes of the past with quiet insight, through the eyes of women who frequently move from a form of innocence to some collision with history.

May 25, 2023 issue

Nicholas Guyatt

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

May 25, 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

Holocaust Memory

Women in a cattle car en route to a death camp

Timothy Snyder

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust.

July 16, 2009 issue

Helen and Leon Hershkowitz, Brooklyn, circa 1952

Allen Hershkowitz

Finding My Father’s Auschwitz File

From the time I learned that my parents had three children murdered, I knew it was my job to try to restore what the Nazis took away.

January 25, 2019

Anne Applebaum

The Worst of the Madness

The vast majority of Hitler’s victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp. Some ten million died in killing fields in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

November 11, 2010 issue

Neal Ascherson

Unspeakable News

There was not much the Allies could have done. But, after all, they did not even do that residue.

October 22, 1981 issue

The Latest

E. Tammy Kim

Storyboards and Solidarity

The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation.

October 5, 2023 issue

Lynn Hunt

The Orphan Among Revolutions

Christopher Clark’s history of the 1848 revolutions highlights the destinies of individuals and the legacy of the tumults.

October 5, 2023 issue

Tim Judah

Black Swan Times

Three months into Ukraine’s counteroffensive, even the best predictions about the war’s outcome could still be thrown off course.

September 13, 2023

William Dalrymple

Vibrant, Cacophonous Buddhism

A groundbreaking show at the Metropolitan Museum displays, among other treasures from India, works of Buddhist art that bear the mark of ancient animist cults that long preceded the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama.

September 21, 2023 issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Trouble with Ancestry

Two recent family histories authored by Americans connected to Europe’s terrible twentieth century by their fascist grandfathers seek to occupy the void between history and memory.

September 21, 2023 issue

Ben Tarnoff

Better, Faster, Stronger

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

September 21, 2023 issue

Eric Foner

Seeing Was Not Believing

A new book identifies the 1968 Democratic convention as the moment when broad public regard for the news media gave way to widespread distrust, and American divisiveness took off.

September 21, 2023 issue

Erin Maglaque

An Overabundance of Virtue

The scholar James Hankins has argued that the revival of ancient virtues was a central concern of Renaissance humanists. But can those virtues also be revived in modern America?

September 21, 2023 issue

James Oakes

Ships Going Out

In American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

September 21, 2023 issue