Politics Literature Arts Ideas

History

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

James Romm

What Happened at Masada?

We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern.

January 14, 2021 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

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

Colin Thubron

Escape from Fortress Crete

Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general in the mountains of Greece during World War II. Was it worth it?

March 11, 2021 issue

Jessica Riskin

When Engineers Were Humanists

During the Renaissance, mechanical inventions served as a medium for experimental thinking about all aspects of the cosmos.

March 11, 2021 issue

T.H. Breen

How Did the Colonies Unite?

The drive for American independence coalesced in only a few years of rapidly accelerating political change.

March 11, 2021 issue

Gregory Hays

Tune Out & Lean In

The recent revival of Stoic philosophy has stayed surprisingly true to its ancient roots while gaining popularity among executives and tech-bros.

March 11, 2021 issue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

A Vermeer for the IRA

Rose Dugdale, famous for a 1974 art heist, would probably rather be remembered as a heroine of Irish republicanism.

March 11, 2021 issue

Peter C. Baker

The Bloodhound

A distinct thread of anger runs through all of Nicholson Baker’s work: anger at what people with power get up to in the shadows, anger at how they lie about it, anger at how we forget.

March 11, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

The Reader of Rocks

William Smith’s innovative use of the fossil record helped him create the first detailed geological map of England, Wales, and Scotland.

March 11, 2021 issue

Larry Wolff

Phantasms of the Opera

The invention of gas illumination offered operagoers in the mid-nineteenth century “a completely new experience of light” that reshaped operatic composition and performance.

March 11, 2021 issue

Frederic Wehrey

The Lost Rivers of Owens Valley

Water—who owns it, who uses it—has shaped this landscape from the Paiutes’ irrigation canals to the Los Angeles aqueduct. And it is a history in which my own family played a part.

February 16, 2021

Uki Goñi

The Hidden History of Black Argentina

A century of European immigration brought with it a comprehensive effort to erase the country’s multiracial past. Only recently has that been reversed.

February 8, 2021