History Archives - Page 9 of 78

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 26, 2022 • by James Carroll

Efforts to immediately erect guardrails around nuclear weapons, given the sorry history that followed upon their falling short, deserve to be lifted up and celebrated as examples of what can follow in the chastened aftermath of a disastrous war....

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

Europe & Central Asia

Part 3: Nuclear Dread Redux

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 19, 2022 • by James Carroll

Putin’s aggression was destroying cities, but it was also destroying what was left of the nascent impulse to move away from the absurdly named “Balance of Terror.”...

Gender

From the Vault: Labor Pains

“One classmate litigator closed up her practice, left a tape of bird songs on her office answering machine, and enrolled in art school.”

September 13, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews

Since I hadn’t been able to get Angela to talk about what trial lawyering may have done to her sense of herself, her “identity” as a woman, I shifted to a different lens: Did she feel, I asked, that the presence of more women lawyers was humanizing the criminal law?...

Europe & Central Asia

Part 2: My Convictions

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 12, 2022 • by James Carroll

Having faulted American policies myself—emphatically so from Clinton forward, when I took on that role of Boston Globe op-ed pundit—I nevertheless refused now to place blame for Putin’s war on America’s drive to protect, in the left-wing argot, its “global hegemony.”...

Literature

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

“Hers is the story, if ever there was one, of a great American”

September 7, 2022 • by Dwight A. McBride

The story of Poems on Various Subjects, like the story of its author, the slave girl named after the ship that brought her across the Atlantic, is a story that should both inspire and enrage. ...

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

Reviews

Burning Cities

The Natural History of Destruction examines the European bombing campaigns of WWII with provocative disregard for convention

July 27, 2022 • by Altair Brandon-Salmon

Part of the film’s thrill is its boldness in posing these ethical questions through sound and imagery. He makes them come alive through his fictionalizing interventions into the archival material, with the extensive foley work and the assemblage of disparate material. It is, dare I say it, entertaining. Destruction is ...

Interviews

Interpretations of the Past

Historian Michael D. Hattem discusses historical memory, reckoning with the creation of “American history”, and his recent book

July 25, 2022 • by Max Pierce and Michael D. Hattem

That put this question in my head: how, and when, did these British colonists, now Americans, stop thinking that the British past was their history? And how did they come to replace it with what we now call “American history”? That question then became the project’s overarching framework: reckoning with ...

History

Watergate Summer

In 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s determination to broadcast a Congressional investigation mattered to our democracy, and revolutionized television news

June 10, 2022 • by Claire Potter

In other words, alternative television showed government as it was, mainlining the excitement of democracy to a dedicated and growing group of political junkies. At the same time, seeing the investigation play out live provided reassurance that Watergate was a constitutional crisis but not, as Nixon characterized it, a plot ...

History

How to Become a Queer Historian

An interview with San Francisco State University scholar-activist Marc Stein

June 1, 2022 • by Claire Potter and Marc Stein

Marc Stein is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where he teaches U.S. law, politics, sexuality, gender, race, and social movements. He’s also an old friend: we met when Marc was in graduate school and I was starting my career as a visiting professor at The University of ...

Capitalism

Capitalism Is Trumping Democracy at Home

During the Cold War, American leaders came to treat democracy and capitalism as if they were interchangeable

May 27, 2022 • by Heather Cox Richardson

All day, I have been coming back to this: How have we arrived at a place where 90% of Americans want to protect our children from gun violence, and yet those who are supposed to represent us in government are unable, or unwilling, to do so? This is a central problem ...

Capitalism Is Trumping Democracy at Home

Interviews

A Hotbed of Anarchism and Clam Pasta

Labor organizing and espionage in Joseph Matthews’s new novel, The Blast

May 18, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

There was a great variety of tremendously active Left formations in San Francisco in 1916, and I wanted to explore that variety within the context of the novel....

History

When Disasters Are Good For Museums

A conversation with historian Sam Redman about his new book, The Museum: A History of Crisis and Resilience

May 17, 2022 • by Claire Potter and Samuel J. Redman

Samuel J. Redman is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The author of two previous books about American museums and the sciences that flourished there in the 19th and early 20th century, this spring, he published his third book: ...

History

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

Part 3: Nuclear Dread Redux

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

From the Vault: Labor Pains

“One classmate litigator closed up her practice, left a tape of bird songs on her office answering machine, and enrolled in art school.”

Part 2: My Convictions

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

“Hers is the story, if ever there was one, of a great American”

Burning Cities

The Natural History of Destruction examines the European bombing campaigns of WWII with provocative disregard for convention

Interpretations of the Past

Historian Michael D. Hattem discusses historical memory, reckoning with the creation of “American history”, and his recent book

Watergate Summer

In 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s determination to broadcast a Congressional investigation mattered to our democracy, and revolutionized television news

How to Become a Queer Historian

An interview with San Francisco State University scholar-activist Marc Stein

Capitalism Is Trumping Democracy at Home

During the Cold War, American leaders came to treat democracy and capitalism as if they were interchangeable

A Hotbed of Anarchism and Clam Pasta

Labor organizing and espionage in Joseph Matthews’s new novel, The Blast

When Disasters Are Good For Museums

A conversation with historian Sam Redman about his new book, The Museum: A History of Crisis and Resilience

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