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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Borders Are War by Other Means
The border today is and is made through sociotechnical arrangements centering data in the regulation of racial difference.
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“A Second Enlightenment”: Greg Grandin on Latin America, the United States, and the Creation of Social-Democratic Modernity
“My books try to explain a tension.”
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“Independence and Abolition Went Hand in Hand”: Julia Gaffield on Jean-Jacques Dessalines
“Securing the first permanent, universal, and immediate abolition of slavery was Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s legacy.”
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Once upon a Time in Tenoxtitlan
Two novels published in 2024 return to some of the best-known, canonical figures and episodes from Mexico’s past.
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Are Species Timeless?: Talking with Bathsheba Demuth About the Arctic
“There was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic.”
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Secrets in the Stacks
A new book demonstrates that the skills taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance to the defense of democracy.
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Borders May Change, But People Remain
The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping the memories of these conflicts alive.
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A Heaven Reflected on Earth: The Golden Temple, Amritsar
Gleaming turrets reflect in the still water, just as, according to the Sikh faith, heaven is reflected on earth.
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A Peek Behind the Old Town’s Walls: Dubrovnik, Croatia
“On the top of the walls, I stopped to admire the panoramic Adriatic Sea views. Below, a basketball court abutted the walls, and kids were shooting hoops.”
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White Suburbs and Drug Wars
To understand the racism of the drug war, in other words, we must look to the ways policymakers sought to protect white suburban youth.
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Interpret or Judge?: John Guillory on the Future of Literary Criticism
“‘Professing criticism’ is a contradiction and maybe even an impossibility. I’d like to hope that it’s not, that it’s just an innovation, historically.”
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D.A.R.E. Is More Than Just Antidrug Education—It Is Police Propaganda
DARE lost its once hegemonic influence over drug education, but it had long-lasting effects on American policing, politics, and culture.
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Pieces of the Past at the Doctors House: Glendale, California
The house may appear as a mere physical artifact, but it contains larger stories of American migration and growth, reckonings with exclusion, and the advent of new technologies.
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Politics—Not Tech—Can Save Black Jobs from AI
Don’t plan to make individuals retrain for new jobs. Instead, build a society that upholds the lives of everyone.
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“Why Do We Go On Pretending?”: Theater at the End of the World
The theatre is where we go to remind ourselves that we are all dying together, and to live better for it.
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Haiti’s Blueprints of Black Sovereignty
How was a self-proclaimed Black nation to define its role in an Atlantic world deeply entwined with enslaved Black labor?
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Enemy of the State
Félix Darfour accused the post-independence Haitian republic with corruption. He lost his life for it.
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Counter-Plantation Nation
The language and culture of Kreyòl, as well as the Vodou religion, reveal a vision of Haitian sovereignty on behalf of those formerly enslaved.
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Haiti: What Sovereignty?
After winning independence, the West rushed to teach Haiti a lesson so that their revolutionary experience would not recur on the continent. Haiti suffers the repercussions of such attacks to this day.
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“We Have Dared to Be Free”
Haiti truly manifested the principles of liberty, but international resistance and racism have worked for 220 years to undermine its sovereignty.
