Interview By Design | Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe August 24, 2020 Porcelain, once dubbed “white gold” after being reproduced by an eighteenth-century Saxon alchemist, may seem to us today like a quaint rarity, a beautiful relic confined to elegant china cabinets. But in Suzanne Marchand’s absorbing history, this translucent ceramic comes to life as a once-ubiquitous commodity linked to geopolitical upheaval and the global transformations of the last three centuries. Read More
Essay The Fourth of July, but not 1776: Independence and epidemics in Boston July 02, 2020 The Fourth of July that mattered most to Revolutionary Boston, the Cradle of Liberty, was not the one in 1776 when the thirteen united states issued a declaration of independence to a “candid world.” Rather, it occurred the year before, in 1775, when the stakes were highest for Boston and New England, and in the form of a much quieter and little-known document. Read More
Interview Adam Sutcliffe on What Are Jews For? July 02, 2020 What is the purpose of Jews in the world? The Bible singles out the Jews as God’s “chosen people,” but the significance of this special status has been understood in many different ways over the centuries. Read More
Essay Fighting the deportation machine June 24, 2020 Javier García Bautista had not been at his station for long on May 17 when someone in the carpentry department of the suburban-Los Angeles shoe factory where he worked yelled out, “The migra is here!” Read More
Essay Masada: A heroic last stand against Rome June 17, 2020 Two thousand years ago, 967 Jewish men, women, and children reportedly chose to take their own lives rather than suffer enslavement or death at the hands of the Roman army. Read More
Interview By Design | The Papers of Thomas Jefferson May 17, 2020 In a ceremony at the Library of Congress on May 17, 1950, President Harry S. Truman accepted the first volume of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, an ambitious project that would span multiple decades and vastly different modes of production. Read More
Essay Grace: A keyword for now and then April 07, 2020 Which are the keywords of our time? Black, Brexit, Climate, Trans? New words, old words that have changed, words that have switched users and come to mean different things from before. Read More
Essay James Baldwin’s reckless idea February 06, 2020 In 1961 James Baldwin found himself in the studios of WBAI radio in New York, looking into the eyes of Malcolm X. Malcolm was, by then, the most recognizable face associated with the Nation of Islam (NOI), a religious sect that was inspiring hope in the hearts of some and fear in the hearts of others. Read More
Essay Getting to know Nat Turner February 03, 2020 Nat Turner is known to history as a thirty-year-old Virginia slave who led a bloody rebellion that resulted in the death of fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. Beyond that, he is famous for being well-nigh unknowable. Read More
Interview By Design | Sunnis and Shi’a: A Political History January 31, 2020 A typographic cover design poses a unique challenge. Unlike book covers that avail themselves of rich imagery, an all-type cover has to articulate a book’s subject with a greater economy of means. Read More
Interview Fei-Hsien Wang on Pirates and Publishers January 22, 2020 In Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time of profound sociopolitical changes. Read More
Essay Melancholy, remorse, and resignation in a year of Communist anniversaries January 17, 2020 Vanguard of the Revolution is a sweeping history of one of the most significant political institutions of the modern world. The communist party was a revolutionary idea long before its supporters came to power. Read More
Essay How do human rights come about?: A few lesser-known activists and the popular movements they led December 10, 2019 How do human rights actually come about? International resolutions and treaties, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are important, but they hardly suffice. Read More
Interview Nicholas Buccola on The Fire is Upon Us November 14, 2019 On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. Read More
Essay Eric D. Weitz on Human Rights Advances September 23, 2019 History is full of human rights tragedies and abuses, and it can be difficult to feel hopeful about the current state of affairs with those atrocities in mind. But there are success stories as well. Here, Eric Weitz shares a few exceptional human rights advances in recent history. Read More