Ideas

History

The Unwilling Celebrity

Maurice Samuels’s Alfred Dreyfus is a biography of the very private man at the center of one of the greatest public controversies of modern times.

April 18, 2024 issue

David A. Bell

Piety & Power

A lively biography of Marie de Vignerot, the niece, confidante, and heiress of Cardinal Richelieu, sheds light on the religious passions and political intrigues of seventeenth-century France.

April 4, 2024 issue

Jenny Uglow

The Volcano Lovers

For travelers in the Romantic period, Mount Vesuvius was an object of scientific curiosity, a political allegory, and a touchstone of the sublime.

April 18, 2024 issue

Héctor Tobar

The Truths of Our American Empire

Jonathan Blitzer’s new book deftly explains the impact of decades of US foreign policy on Central America, but fails to move beyond the troubled terrain of our immigration policy “crisis.”

April 18, 2024 issue

Jessica Riskin

Every Creeping Thing

In his late writings and correspondence, Charles Darwin was thinking about how mortal beings strive to make what they can of themselves.

March 21, 2024 issue

Josephine Quinn

The Thrill of Late Antiquity

The historian Peter Brown’s memoir recounts an academic career that has taken him from Oxford to Iran to California, in a nostalgic portrait of twentieth-century academic life that can still offer a primer to young scholars.

March 7, 2024 issue

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Finding My Roots

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.

September 29, 2023

Eric Foner

A ‘Wary Faith’ in the Courts

A groundbreaking new book demonstrates that even during the days of slavery, African Americans knew a lot more about legal principles than has been imagined.

April 4, 2024 issue

After Weimar

Elke Schulze

He Ridiculed the Nazis

The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life.

September 14, 2017

Anka Muhlstein

The Genius in Exile

“You lose one home after another, I say to myself. Here I am, sitting with my wanderer’s staff. My feet are sore, my heart is tired, my eyes are dry.”

November 6, 2014 issue

J.M. Coetzee

The Man with Many Qualities

“From the moment the Reichstag burned in 1933, Robert Musil foresaw how badly Germany was about to betray itself.”

March 18, 1999 issue

John Willett

Art of a Nasty Time

Nazi art showed how certain already prevalent German traditions and characteristics could be harnessed to the Nazi cause. What is more, they recalled corresponding features in the art of other countries—the kind of tame classicism, flashy Italianate portraiture, sub-Barbizon rusticity, and lumpy earthiness that could be found also in London, Rome, Paris, and New York.

June 26, 1980 issue

The Latest

Susan Tallman

The Occupation of Looking

The discipline of art history today is far more inclusive, more cognizant of social history, and less prone to normative aesthetic judgments—changes Svetlana Alpers helped bring about.

December 19, 2024 issue

Michael Chabon

The Midnight World

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.

December 19, 2024 issue

Joshua Hammer

Making Germany Hate Again

In Look Away, Jacob Kushner draws a disturbing portrait of the white supremacist subculture that took hold across eastern Germany in the 1990s and now is making gains at the ballot box.

December 19, 2024 issue

Ian Tattersall

Look Who’s Talking

When did our first linguistic ancestor emerge, and how did the transition from a nonlinguistic to a linguistic state take place?

December 19, 2024 issue

John J. Lennon

Tangled Justice

A new book examines the complex relationship between forgiveness and justice through the story of Paula Cooper, who was sentenced to death at the age of sixteen.

December 19, 2024 issue

Francesca Wade

‘Insouciant Pagan Journal’

The Little Review, the radical and short-lived magazine helmed by Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, was a vanguard of modernism in American culture.

December 19, 2024 issue

Robert Kuttner

The Import of Exports

Free trade once aligned with America’s economic and security interests, but in recent years experts have suggested pulling back from globalism and rebuilding the domestic economy.

December 19, 2024 issue

R.J.W. Evans

Centers on the Margins

The dark history of Buczacz, an ordinary town in western Ukraine, exemplifies the fate of Jews in the vast marginal territories of East-Central Europe.

December 19, 2024 issue

Erin Maglaque

Soundscapes of the Silenced

In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.

December 5, 2024 issue

Magda Teter

Jewish Middlemen, Archival Myopia

The story of two Jewish trading families during the last decades of the Regency of Algiers is skewed by being told through the perspectives of only European and American actors.

December 5, 2024 issue