History

What Would Alexis de Tocqueville Have Made of the 2016 US Presidential Election?

What Would Alexis de Tocqueville Have Made of the 2016 US Presidential Election? What Would Alexis de Tocqueville Have Made of the 2016 US Presidential Election?

Feverish thoughts from a moment of “extreme peril.”

Sep 28, 2016 / Feature / Arthur Goldhammer

Fortress America

Fortress America Fortress America

How 20th-century liberals helped create our age of mass incarceration.

Sep 27, 2016 / Books & the Arts / James Forman Jr.

The Black Panthers’ Overlooked Revolution

The Black Panthers’ Overlooked Revolution The Black Panthers’ Overlooked Revolution

Fifty years later, four women who helped build the party look back on the less-attention-grabbing part of its history.

Sep 22, 2016 / Feature / Yohuru Williams and Bryan Shih

The Get Down

Diamond-Dust Baroque Diamond-Dust Baroque

The Get Down, Baz Luhrman’s fairy-tale remix of the birth of hip hop, offers a glimpse of the beginning of the end of US power.

Sep 15, 2016 / Joshua Clover

Black as We Wanna Be

Black as We Wanna Be Black as We Wanna Be

Trying to remedy racism on its own intellectual terrain is like trying to extinguish a fire by striking another match. The fiction must be unbelieved, the fire stamped out.

Sep 15, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Matthew McKnight

Who Freed the Slaves?

Who Freed the Slaves? Who Freed the Slaves?

For some time now, the answer has not been the abolitionists.

Sep 13, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Stephanie McCurry

Behind the Sun

Behind the Sun Behind the Sun

In four books about Syria and Egypt, the narrative arc of revolution bends toward disappointment.

Sep 6, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Ursula Lindsey

Y-12_sign

How a Nun, a Vet, and a Housepainter Stood Up to the Threat of Nuclear Weapons How a Nun, a Vet, and a Housepainter Stood Up to the Threat of Nuclear Weapons

Dan Zak’s Almighty reminds readers that the United States’ poisonous and very expensive history of nuclear-weapons production is far from over.

Aug 31, 2016 / Frida Berrigan

Warren Hinckle and staffers

Warren Hinckle’s Truth-to-Power Journalism and Politics Broke the Conventional Wisdom Warren Hinckle’s Truth-to-Power Journalism and Politics Broke the Conventional Wisdom

As the editor of Ramparts, he helped shape the radicalism of the 1960s, and kept on challenging injustice and “professional megabuck politics.”

Aug 26, 2016 / John Nichols

Ghostly Presences

Ghostly Presences Ghostly Presences

Unable to write effectively but unable to remain silent, W.G. Sebald, like the narrator of The Emigrants, is condemned to speak unsatisfactorily.

Aug 17, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Becca Rothfeld

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