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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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 Machete”—which helped to incite that genocide—and President Trump’s tweets. This is not to say that Trump is marching the United States toward genocide, nor that hateful…
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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 the United States being a welcoming country to immigrants, about how the “bootstrap” mentality enables one to build and sustain a life here. Another is…
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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 …
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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 … [none-for-homepage]
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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 whatever might come after, what else is there to want, in the wake of naming injury, but to fix…
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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 …
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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 …
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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 … [none-for-homepage]
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What the Constitution Means to Us
On June 22, 1999, Jessica Lenahan’s estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, abducted their three daughters from outside Jessica’s house, in Castle Rock …
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Public Thinker: Kathleen Belew on the Rise of “White Power”
Kathleen Belew is an international authority on the white-power movement …
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And Cuba Shall Lead Them
In an era when, history textbooks contend, the United States lurched to the right, Gus Newport presided over an unapologetically leftist government in the San Francisco Bay Area. If the region has a progressive reputation today, it is because people like Newport fought to make it so. As mayor of Berkeley from 1979 to 1986,…
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“There Is a Scottsboro in Every Country”
When we speak about a future in which all black people in America can be free, it’s hard to picture how, exactly, that freedom might look. Many black communists …
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“Am I Not One of the ‘Disappeared’?”
Zahia Rahmani’s « Musulman » roman hinges on a question that has gathered force in recent years: a witness is speaking, but will she ever be heard?
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Afterlife of the Troubles
In December 1972, 38-year-old Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was abducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), never to be seen alive by her children again. Her remains weren’t recovered until 2003, when, along Shelling Hill Beach in County Louth, a man and his two children stumbled across her bones. This was…
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Public Thinker: Thomas J. Sugrue on History’s Hard Lessons
From producing towering classics in the field of urban history to penning …
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Guns Made the State, and the State Made Guns
Industrialist and philanthropist, lobbyist and cultural leader: Samuel Galton Jr. was in 1795 a prominent member of Birmingham’s bourgeoisie. He was also …
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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 …
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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 violent past. A Marxist and atheist, he spoke with regret about the disappearance of the Christian…
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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 …
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“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 …
