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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Must We Have Lives?
“Hermione Lee was very kind,” Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote of the woman who would later become her biographer. “Although she clearly thinks I am hopeless about feminism, and says this is the generation gap.” This anecdote appears nearly four hundred pages into Lee’s recent biography of Fitzgerald, nestled in a cluster of quotations meant to…
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Studying Up
In an often-quoted manifesto, Laura Nader urged fellow anthropologists (and, by extension, sociologists and other social scientists) to “study up,” do their research among the rich and powerful people directly responsible for the ills of society, rather than among the poor, who can’t as easily protect themselves from intrusive social scientists who want to pry…
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The Dress Has Always Been News
As “the dress” befuddled the Internet’s hive mind, our newsfeeds swelled. Tumblr and Buzzfeed, recognizing the viral power of a garment that appears gold and white to some but blue and black to others, got the freight train rolling. Soon, bastions of journalism such as the New York Times and Washington Post hopped on board. Experts in cognition assured us that…
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Bellatrix and the American Revolution
Bellatrix, a star in the Orion constellation, is 240 light-years from Earth. The light emitted from Bellatrix that we currently see began its journey just prior to the American Revolution, when Paul Revere and Benjamin Franklin were flesh and blood and there was no United States. Most histories of the period do not begin with…
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Queen Victoria’s Power
“Victoria was routinely praised for embodying the qualities of the ideal constitutional monarch. But what constituted this ideal behavior?”
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The History and Philosophy of Adventure
We often think of adventure—it’s hard to avoid, saturated as the culture is with film, television, and books that place it at their center. But what adventure is, what it means to pursue it, and what its pursuit means to us have all changed significantly over time. In these two essays, which we publish in…
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Democracy’s Candide
The atrocity last month at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo reminds us that a free press is as basic in France as it is in the United States. This is one of the freedoms Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, urged his countrymen to adopt in the early days of…
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Race: Past, Present, and Future Tense
“White culture has been on the fritz lately and I’m not sure it is coming back.” So wrote one of my undergraduate students on her final exam a few years back. I remember laughing out loud at the time, but her pithy sentence stuck with me. Somehow, that image of white culture as a broken-down…
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Why Is Drug Use Forbidden?
If the 20th was the century of the prohibition of drugs, the 21st has every chance to be the century of their liberation. An increasing number of initiatives—state, national, and international—have legalized or are trying to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Colorado and Washington have, already, authorized its sale in specialized stores, and Alaska,…
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Wellington’s Cuba Street: On the Restless Taniwha
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. You can’t, it is said, beat Wellington on a good day. Those days come in January, in the height of the New Zealand summer. The wind softens to a breeze, silver sunlight floods the jade hills that surround…
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Enrigue’s Backspin
Four-fifths of the way through Álvaro Enrigue’s Muerte súbita (Sudden Death), the narrator admits that he doesn’t know what the book is about. It’s not about the birth of tennis as a popular sport. Nor is it about the European conquest of the Americas, or about the Counter-Reformation. It’s more a book about how one…
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American Cassandra
A Prophet for Our Times The modern American prophet cloaks himself in the trope of youthful utopianism lost, and the latest practitioner of this prophetic genre is Francis Fukuyama. His prose is a measure of his times and, as his readers, ours: times of disenchantment. A classics major at Cornell, Fukuyama came under the spell…
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Weekend Reading: Rise of the Machines
It’s nearly over, but 2014 hasn’t totally packed it in yet. Here is your weekend reading, to get you through to 2015: Real-life personages rendered on screen will naturally be subject to a lot of scrutiny, if only from the know-it-alls desperate for anachronisms to moan about. A mindless exercise in hum-buggery when applied to…
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The Year of Guilty Pleasures
American critics may as well have designated 2014 the Year of Talking About Guilty Pleasures. In the last 12 months, the New Yorker (three times), the New York Times, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times, among others, have weighed in on the tension between what we think we should be reading and what we actually do.…
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Morality and the Italian Civil War: An Interview with Stanislao Pugliese
After more than 20 years, Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, recognized as a masterpiece of Italian historiography, has been translated into English. Stanislao Pugliese, professor of history at Hofstra University, edited this 700-page magnum opus and added a detailed introduction, making available for the first time to the American…
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Changing Climates of History
Neither Thucydides, Gibbon, von Ranke, nor Braudel ever cited a paper appearing in Geophysical Research Letters. They did not worry themselves about fluctuations in the Siberian High or the Southern Oscillation. The vast majority of more recent historians also remained untroubled by such concerns. However, in the past five years, a handful of highly distinguished…
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Nothing Has Been Done Before
Debate his song selections if you like, but in his latest book Greil Marcus is not out to craft a new Top 40—or, indeed, a Top 10. Instead, he’s out to challenge the basic principles by which the history of rock music has so far been understood. From its opening pages—a visually dense yet ostentatiously…
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Historical Futorology
These days headlines often read like plot points in an apocalyptic science-fiction story: Fossil fuel use has reengineered the earth’s atmosphere and acidified the oceans. Polar ice sheets are melting. Coastal cities are flooding. The planet has entered the epoch of the sixth mass extinction. Scanning the outline of this drama over your morning coffee,…
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Today’s Stories of Yesterday: Recent Historical Fiction
Contemporary historical fiction occupies virtually every point on the history–fiction spectrum: fictional stories of real-life people; narratives of real-life events experienced by fictional characters; fiction that rewrites novels of the past; and wholly fictional stories that inhabit an otherwise real past. Looking to the entire span of recorded and not-yet-recorded history (think Cloud Atlas), today…
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Our Mis-Leading Indicators
Spring 1932: former Ford Motor Company workers protest at the company’s River Rouge Complex, where police and private security kill five and injure more than 60; unemployed World War I veterans camp out on the steps of the Capitol, demanding “adjusted compensation” for their service; more than three quarters of a million New Yorkers are…
