Industrialist and philanthropist, lobbyist and cultural leader: Samuel Galton Jr. was in 1795 a prominent member of Birmingham’s bourgeoisie. He was also ...
Tag: History
Bearing Risks and Being Watched
If two features define contemporary capitalism, they are first the tendency of each individual to increasingly bear alone the risks associated with living in a ...
Turkey’s “Ghost Empire”
A Turkish academic I once met in a provincial Anatolian city insisted to me that Turkey is a country where a lot goes unsaid, a place where much is buried, and where fairy tales are told to hide a ...
B-Sides: Chaucer’s “The House of Fame”
For years, and with particular intensity since the 2015 Dylann Roof shooting and 2016 election, we have debated the fate of not only Confederate monuments but ...
“Hamilton”: Who Tells Your Story?
Hamilton: An American Musical, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, achieved an unusual degree of cultural cachet almost immediately upon its 2015 Broadway ...
“Caste, Class, and Race” @ 70
As we pass the 70th anniversary of Trinidadian American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, his message ...
@X: Making America White 200 Years Ago
In January 1817, more than three thousand African Americans gathered in Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia ...
The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it ...
Public Thinker: David Blight on Frederick Douglass, Abolition, and Memory
Puzzling out the meaning of the Civil War and its aftermath has been David Blight’s lifelong work ...
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 ...
Public Thinker: David Blight on Frederick Douglass, Abolition, and Memory
Puzzling out the meaning of the Civil War and its aftermath has been David Blight’s lifelong work ...
From Slate to Silicon?
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 ...
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 ...
