History

Another New World

Claudio Lomnitz’s Nuestra América is an account of his Ashkenazi Jewish family’s persistent, sometimes bewildered search across four continents for a language, culture, identity, and place they can call their own.

June 10, 2021 issue

Helen Epstein and Claude Gatebuke

The Roots of Rwanda’s Genocide

Why have so many Western historians, journalists, and human rights investigators failed to grasp why Hutu Rwandans suddenly started killing their Tutsi neighbors in April 1994?

June 10, 2021 issue

Michael Kazin

Ending the Kennedy Romance

The first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK reveals the scope of his ambition and the weakness of his political commitments.

May 27, 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

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

Fires during the Haitian Revolution; engraving by Jean-Baptiste Chapuy, circa 1791

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

The Latest

Ian Johnson

A Most Adaptable Party

The belief that history brought it to power is one of the few ideological constants in the Chinese Communist Party’s hundred-year saga.

July 1, 2021 issue

Catherine Nicholson

The Triumph of Mutabilitie

Edmund Spenser’s long, daunting The Faerie Queen combines political allegory with some of the most flickering, ambiguous poetry in English.

July 1, 2021 issue

Sean Wilentz

Forging an Early Black Politics

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

July 1, 2021 issue

Christopher R. Browning

Blue Bloods and Brownshirts

The relationship between German nobles and the Nazis was a misalliance in which attraction prevailed over repulsion.

July 1, 2021 issue

Fara Dabhoiwala

Imperial Delusions

From the late eighteenth century onward, the British justified their empire with a continually updated ideology of moral purpose and historical necessity.

July 1, 2021 issue

David A. Bell

A Haunted Patrimony

Through their art collecting wealthy Jews staked a claim to being French, but the nation they loved savagely betrayed them.

July 1, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

Contagious Constitutions

Linda Colley shows in her new book that written constitutions developed both as a means of shoring up entrenched rulers and of turning successful rebellions into legitimate governments.

June 10, 2021 issue

Ariel Dorfman

A Taxonomy of Tyrants

Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen delineates what the last century’s macho dictators have had in common.

May 27, 2021 issue

Anna Della Subin

The Rules of the Confidence Game

The Book of Charlatans provides an unusual glimpse into the street life of medieval Islamic societies rarely captured in more elevated Arabic literary sources.

May 27, 2021 issue