Hazzard was given to lingering in the fraught silences that follow great tumult, taking the time to find something worth saying.
Tag: History
Immigration: What We’ve Done, What We Must Do
Once, abolitionists had to imagine a world without slavery. Can we similarly envision a world where migrants are offered justice?
The Arch of Injustice
St. Louis seems to define America’s past—but does it offer insight for the future?
From Versailles to the War on Terror
The status of the Ottoman Empire and its extraterritorial treaties were left in violent limbo at Versailles. This impacts the world to this day.
How Versailles Still Haunts the World
Middle Eastern borders, democratic defeats, the US War on Terror: all this flows from the Treaty of Versailles, now just over a century old.
“Somewhere in This Brain”: Memories of Segregation, Soul Music & “Macbeth” with Al Bell
"A song was written through me, and I say that because I didn't write it. The words were given to me."
Identity, Islands, and Hazel V. Carby
What histories do we inherit? In the current crisis of Brexit—which points to larger global shifts toward nationalism and xenophobia—there is no more urgent a ...
Igiaba Scego on Writing between History and Literature
“I strongly lay claim to imagination, because to us Black women for a long time the possibility of imagination had been negated.”
Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War
Both violent surveillance and disease risk were integral to Atlantic slavery. That same war against Black people continues today.
Buster Keaton Falls Up
Comedy demands a fall guy—someone upon whom the absurdity crashes and yet who emerges unscathed. And in comedy, Buster Keaton remains unrivaled.
The DJ Is a Time Machine
Let’s rupture and reject the “timeline,” a flawed and colonial form of teaching history.
A Communism of Feelings
What role should emotions play in leftist political movements?
Public Thinker: B. R. Cohen on How Food Became “Pure”
“There were so many new laws, I had to make a map showing the spread and intensity of antimargarine laws in states over a quarter century.”
Unruly Objects
By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
Public Thinker: Marcia Chatelain on Feminism, Fast Food, and First Gens
“Being in community with people and teaching and learning outside of the confines of our classroom: I still actually really believe in that.”
Free Is and Free Ain’t
Freedom has always been arbitrary in a world, then and now, when the practice of capitalism requires the ongoing erosion of even the most basic rights.
Settler Fantasies, Televised
House-hunting and home-improvement TV shows are premised on the settler fantasy of property ownership—and that fantasy’s relationship to whiteness.
“Somewhere in This Brain”: Memories of Segregation, Soul Music & “Macbeth” with Al Bell
"A song was written through me, and I say that because I didn't write it. The words were given to me."
All the World’s a Page
Paper was never simply a writing surface, but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness.
What’s in a Name?
Stanley Lieberson wrestled with the problem of causation throughout his prodigious research career, but nowhere more ingeniously than in A Matter of Taste.
