Tag
History
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What Happens When Belief Stops Mattering?
“From the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 to the advent of Gorbachev’s glasnost in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was sustained not by terror or conviction, but by something harder to name: a routinization of participation.”
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The World in a Blot of Ink
What might this be? A moth, a bat, a winged musical conductor, a spaceship? Whatever you may see, you are also looking at Card I of the Rorschach test …
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Signs of Bombay
In December 2016, Public Books Editor in Chief Sharon Marcus spent a few days in Mumbai, participating in the Times of India Literary Festival and walking around the city. Mumbai, also known as …
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B-Sides: Charles Portis’s “Gringos”
Faithful readers of Charles Portis tend to be rabidly in love with his writing, but a little mystified by its potency. Like a retired Crown Vic Interceptor acquired …
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Darwin’s Early Adopters
During the icy winter of 1860, Franklin Sanborn preferred to stay indoors. The bad weather in Concord, Massachusetts, was cause enough, but the young political activist had another reason: he feared that he would be arrested and put to death for his support of John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry months…
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Keyword of the Week: Hunger
Humanitarian groups are projecting four impending famines, in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen. This week’s Public Bookshelf features Public Books articles about the history of food crises and hunger. Syria’s Wartime Famine at 100: “Martyrs of the Grass” 12.15.2016 Najwa al-Qattan In the days leading up to the Muslim holiday of the Feast of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) in October 2013, several Syrian clerics issued…
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Durham and the Art of Cool
May 2016 in downtown Durham, North Carolina, was marked by two weekend music festivals, the Art of Cool and Moogfest, which were presented in the …
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The Prehistory of the Muslim Ban
Banning all Muslims was a popular campaign slogan for then-candidate Donald Trump. People cheered at the simple logic: all Muslims pose a …
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B-Sides: Isherwood’s “Prater Violet”
Judging from his writing, Christopher Isherwood must have been an ideal guest at a dinner party: intelligent, witty …
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Two Islands, Two Fates: Inishbofin and Inishark, Ireland
To get to Inishbofin, an island nine miles off the west coast of Ireland, you take a …
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When Slaveholders Ran America
In 1837, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina strode into the US Senate chamber and thundered that slavery was a “positive good.” Black bondage was …
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What The Left Today Can Learn from Paul Robeson
Gerald Horne is one of the leading and most influential historians in the nation. His research explores racism in a variety of contexts, involving labor, politics …
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The Fog of the Drug War
It is almost impossible to know exactly what happens when a crime is committed in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. The basic questions often cannot be answered: Who is the victim? Who killed her or him? Why? Drug trafficking, violence, and militarization have turned murder into a problem that few could solve, even as…
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@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 …
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Free Is and Free Ain’t
Are novelists who write about slavery reminding us of its ongoing effects, or using the past to illuminate problems specific to the present? Are they arguing that slavery never stopped shaping African American lives in the United States, or helping us to imagine new grounds for African American feelings of national belonging? In the weeks…
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The Yurt of Fiction
This summer, George Saunders wrote that Donald Trump had given him a gift. Saunders had been traveling across the country, attending Trump rallies …
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The South African Novel Today
Who is South Africa’s leading English novelist? Who has succeeded Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee—still with us, but hardly a South African novelist any longer? Since the arrival of democracy …
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The Book That Made Me: Learn How to Love
The Book That Made Me is a series about the books that have changed our lives. In this inaugural installment, a National Book Award–winning historian …
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Police Brutality, a Horror Story
Victor LaValle’s new novella bridges the weird and the ordinary, and reveals the ordinary to be all the more terrifying. LaValle employs the paranormal not to reject reality, but to open a portal into the experience of everyday social marginalization. What if, muses the book’s 20-year-old African American protagonist, “another world existed within—or alongside—the world…
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The Mortal Marx
In the mid-1860s, as an anxious and ailing Karl Marx worked on the 30-page essay that would billow into Das Kapital, his daughter Eleanor—“Tussy”—would play under his desk. With her dolls, kittens, and puppies, Tussy turned the sage’s study into her playroom. Occasionally, Marx would take a break from his “fat book” (as the family…
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Code-Switching: An Interview with James Hannaham
Might a stand-up comedian discuss slavery in America with considerable doses of humor? Happens all the time. A contemporary novelist? Not so much. It is the rare writer who is willing to approach the topic without the requisite gravitas. In James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods, a harrowing tale of slave labor in the contemporary United States,…
