Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony ...
Tag: History
Black Speculation, Black Freedom
Many black scholars—especially those who study black life, history, and culture—would recognize an uncomfortable and familiar situation that epitomizes ...
Algiers: Capital of Revolution
In 2018, it is difficult to imagine what it felt like to live through a genuinely revolutionary moment, one that connected hopes for the Third World with dreams ...
Who Segregated America?
Recently long-listed for the National Book Award for nonfiction, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is an accessible and powerful account of how metropolitan America became racially segregated ...
Darwin’s Beard and George Eliot’s Hands
“Ah even in death he is beautiful, beautiful in death, as one that hath fallen on sleep.” Thus did Percy Bysshe Shelley describe the tuberculosis death of his friend John ...
American Cuisine’s Debt to the Enslaved
Men and houses lie; plantation mistresses beat naked cooks. These and other facts have been shrouded in a mythology that rose with the smoke from kitchen fires ...
Citizens: 150 Years of the 14th Amendment
It is possible to tell the story of the 14th Amendment’s adoption as one driven by the maneuvering of highly placed lawmakers—judges and members of ...
Are Sharp Women Enough?
Twitter was a medium made for Dorothy Parker—alas, a century too late. Her famous poem “Resumé” is 141 characters. Her breakout feature in Vanity Fair, a series of Hate Songs, begs for a hashtag ...
Muses Explain Things to Me
The feminist muse is an artist, too. No silent sitter, she swaps the easel-facing chaise for a work space wholly hers, sloughing off the obligation to inspire ...
The Revolution’s Failed Promise to Women
On a recent research trip to Tbilisi, I stayed with a retired math professor and master storyteller named Tsiala in the communal apartment she’d remade ...
Free the Most Oppressed First
Do we still need to talk about identity politics? In the wake of the 2016 election and amid the ongoing parody that is the Trump administration, the subject has ...
“Slave Old Man” in English, English in “Slave Old Man”
Linda Coverdale’s English translation of the 1997 novel L’esclave vieil homme et ...
Black Women Leaders, Then and Now
In August 1966, Ebony magazine published an entire issue devoted to “The Negro Woman.” In it was an article by television personality and journalist ...
B-Sides: Alexei Tolstoy’s “Road to Calvary”
If you are a Russian writer called Tolstoy, you forever lurk in the great shadow cast by your namesake. After all, what could compare to War and Peace? Now ...
Zora Neale Hurston Against the World
Throughout her life, Zora Neale Hurston held fast to a belief in the individual’s power against seemingly insurmountable forces, especially institutional racism ...
Zora Neale Hurston in the Making
Zora Neale Hurston’s second trip to Africatown was a chance for redemption. An earlier visit to the settlement outside Mobile, Alabama, had produced ...
We See You, Race Women
When I was in graduate school, whenever a black woman scholar presented her work a peculiar phenomenon emerged: peers always and only remarked on the speaker’s person, rather than on her ideas. At ...
May 1968 @50
On April 27, 2018, a hundred people showed up at Columbia University to talk about the French student and worker revolts of May–June 1968. Many such conferences are taking place around the world to ...
Ondaatje’s Long War
In a scathing review of The English Patient, Hilary Mantel called Michael Ondaatje’s most feted work “uneven, unresolved, unsatisfactory.” Her criticism has since become a regular complaint about the ...
Public Thinker: Keisha N. Blain on Black Women’s Intellectual History
Keisha N. Blain has quickly become one of the most innovative and influential ...