Why did American police end up in cars? And how did policing the nation’s roads become so racially unjust? In Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom, legal historian Sarah Seo uses motor vehicle search and ...
Tag: History
Disrupting the “Startup Hustle”: An Interview with Margaret O’Mara
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Jeff Bezos ...
Public Thinker: Kevin Kruse on Why Recent History Is Still History
“Historian. Author/editor of White Flight; The New Suburban History; Spaces of ...
“Kingdom of Dolls”: Sonneberg, Germany
In her mid-19th-century children’s book, Memoirs of a Doll, Julie Gouraud warns her readers not to unstitch their dolls looking for origins and inner workings ...
Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos
Readers today believe that they are living through unprecedented changes in how ...
Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront ...
Borders, Guns, and Freedom
Like the pioneers two hundred years before him, Mark Romano recently decided to head West. Like those pioneers, Mark—a white, unemployed electrician ...
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 ...
Public Thinker: Kathleen Belew on the Rise of “White Power”
Kathleen Belew is an international authority on the white-power movement ...
Exile by the Bay
Imagining home is an inescapable preoccupation of disinherited people. Of all the possessions lost or denied, none is more precious than the security and feeling of belonging that a genuine home ...
The Breaks of History
Ralph Ellison once suggested that “living with music” provides us with “an orientation in time.” Music, in other words, helps us locate and anchor ourselves within a history that exceeds us. Living ...
Fill the Halls: Space and Possibility in Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore today can feel like a city of security checks and gated passages, tall walls and ...
Trump’s “Radio Machete”
This year, Rwanda commemorates the 25th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi. Americans would do well to consider the sobering similarities between the Rwandan “hate radio,” or “Radio ...
A Black Counternarrative
Master narratives become the background music of our lives, undercurrents so ingrained that the violence they often engender is rendered unremarkable. One master narrative is the tale we tell about ...
A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with ...
Chicago Yesterday and Today: A Conversation with Carlo Rotella
Carlo Rotella is a professor of American studies, English, and journalism at Boston College; he’s also one of the most talented writers in the humanities ...
Impossible Belonging
If the sharp end of critique’s job is to name injury, then it also has a soft lining that is oriented around recovery and repair. Even if a particular critical project stays with injury rather than ...
QUIZZICAL: Famous Writers, and Their Pets!
Behind many celebrated writers is a canine, feline, reptilian, or avian pal. Do you know the domestic creatures that have kept these novelists, playwrights, poets ...
Newspapers and Northern Lights
In 1818 John Ross pointed the ship Isabella toward the Northwest Passage and opened up the Arctic exploration mania; the Shackleton-Rowett expedition of ...
Public Thinker: Kim Phillips-Fein on Austerity and the Fall of New York
With New York City teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse at the end of 1975, Congress passed ...
