History Archives - Page 17 of 78

From the Editors

The Last Monday in May

There are no parades, no baseball games, no parties, and we stay home all the time anyway: why should we care that it is Memorial Day?

May 22, 2020 • by Claire Potter

As Joan Rivers would say, “Oh, grow up!” First of all, let’s be clear: Memorial Day is not about you. It’s about honoring the dead, which would make you think it would be a more sober holiday than it usually is nowadays. And initially, it was. Memorial Day sprang from the practice ...

Public Health

The Job of Critical Thinking Now

Protest offers a vision of the future that refuses mere recovery

May 7, 2020 • by Joan Wallach Scott

As with those other fault-lines, the problem is not new, as François Hartog reminds us when he writes of “presentism.” Sometime in the twentieth century, we lost our belief in the redemptive power of history and so in the guarantee of a better future. Wendy Brown puts it succinctly: “We know ...

History

Challenging the Perception of the Wayward Girl

An interview with Saidiya Hartman

April 21, 2020 • by Saidiya Hartman and Yannise Jean

Yannise Jean [YJ]: For this book, you took a different approach by structuring it like a fictional narrative. I think this structure really helps the reader get into the character's heads. Was this your intention during the outlining stages of your book? Saidiya Hartman [SH]: I write nonfiction. As I started to write ...

Challenging the Perception of the Wayward Girl

History

Lies Are Back in Power

The history and troublesome present of fascist ideology

April 16, 2020 • by Federico Finchelstein

Today we’re seeing an emergent wave of new right-wing populist leaders throughout the world. And much like fascist leaders of the past, a great deal of their political power is derived from questioning reality; endorsing myth, rage, and paranoia; and promoting lies. In my new book, A Brief History of Fascist ...

History

The Coronavirus Time Warp

Reading medieval literature in the midst of a pandemic

April 10, 2020 • by Eric Weiskott

We are in a fourteenth-century time warp, living through another pandemic originating in Asia and laying waste to Europe. Although this plague is less deadly than the Black Death, it has globalization on its side. The Black Death took ten years to reach Europe; coronavirus took two months. The Black Death ...

History

COVID-19: When History Has No Lessons

Facing a crisis without precedent

April 6, 2020 • by Gaëtan Thomas and Guillaume Lachenal

“With such a timely specialization, why aren’t you on CNN right now?,” asked a well-meaning individual at a gathering over drinks a few weeks ago, as the conversation inevitably turned to the coronavirus, which still seemed like a far away phenomenon. “What does the historian of medicine think of all ...

History

Female Husbands

A Trans History

March 31, 2020 • by Jen Manion

Female husband as a descriptive category lost its meaning in public discourse just as it proliferated in the U.S. from roughly 1878 to 1906. It had already largely fallen out of use in the U.K. Female husbands -- once defined by manhood and masculinity -- were quietly and subtly subsumed ...

Theory & Practice

Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis

In a world shifting more quickly than we can consider, analysis is more important than ever

March 30, 2020 • by Benjamin P. Davis and Jonathon Catlin

Catastrophe is not “to come,” but here and now. Before the current pandemic, our way of life was already killing life on earth. State selections of who shall live and who shall die already produced medical shortages. “That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility ...

Literature

The Strangeness and Miracle of Being

An Interview With Ilya Kominsky

March 27, 2020 • by Ilya Kominsky and Jessalyn Johnson

The following interview with Ilya Kominsky, a 2020 finalist in poetry, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. In his book Deaf Republic, award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky explores political disorder in a community where the people are united in a time of tragedy, ...

Democracy

Gray is Beautiful, Part 2

On the Social Condition and Fractured Society in Donald Trump’s America

March 24, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Gray Beauty I came to appreciate the beauty of the gray listening to a lecture by Adam Michnik at The New School for Social Research in 1996. In his lecture, likewise entitled “Gray is Beautiful,” Michnik declared: “Radical movements -- whether under black or red banners -- gladly use democracy in order ...

Kinships

Fragments of Memoir and Other Manuscripts

An excerpt from Honor Moore, “Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury”

March 24, 2020 • by Honor Moore

“This is my oldest daughter.” I look at him and smile. “How do you do -- ” “You’ve got a great mom!” I would have said “a great mother.” I don’t like it when people use “mom” as a noun like that, and what does he know anyway, about this woman. He turns and ...

Fragments of Memoir and Other Manuscripts

Feminism

Leading the Resistance Into Battle

An Interview With Sonia Purnell

March 24, 2020 • by Sonia Purnell and Taylor Sue Leonhardt

The following interview with Sonia Purnell, a 2020 finalist in biography, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. In her biography, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, Sonia Purnell captures the ...