Joint Jihad
December 6, 2023
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz— Parliaments cry about a “pan-Islamic danger,” noted the Islam scholar Martin Hartmann. “But are fellow Muslims really our enemies?”1 He asked this 111 years ago as a… READ MORE
Category: European History
In the Eye of the Serpent
November 17, 2023
Whitney Barlow Robles— The serpent who beguiled Eve. Medusa’s ossifying glance. The hypnotic command of Kaa in Kipling’s Jungle Book. Harry’s second year at Hogwarts, turned upside down by a basilisk…. READ MORE
Why the Crusades Matter
November 10, 2023
Christopher Tyerman— The crusades offer features to fascinate and disturb modern audiences. Surviving evidence–literary, archival, archaeological, visual and material–allows access in some detail to individual experiences as well as large… READ MORE
Feeling the Past to Touch the Future
October 27, 2023
Henry Petroski— The bubonic epidemic known as the Great Plague broke out in London in 1665 and lasted for two years. During that time, citizens who could escape to the… READ MORE
The Cookery Book
October 17, 2023
Helen Fry— During wartime women were a valuable source of intelligence-gathering because they could move much more freely in occupied countries than men. They used their “invisibility” to gather and… READ MORE
Understanding the Impossible
October 11, 2023
Carlos Eire — Levitating saints raise questions that no historian should avoid. Never mind the metaphysical questions, that floating ten-ton anvil that historians dare not touch, much less acknowledge. Aside… READ MORE
The Student: A Conversation with Michael S. Roth
October 9, 2023
In The Student: A Short History, Michael S. Roth narrates a vivid and dynamic history of students, exploring some of the principal models for learning that have developed in very… READ MORE
Walter Jens’s Tragedies
October 2, 2023
Michael H. Kater— Walter Jens was the first among a group of young West German novelists who attempted to come to grips with the Third Reich. As a twenty-seven-year-old, in 1950… READ MORE
The Challenge of Casanova
September 22, 2023
Leo Damrosch— Everyone knows that Casanova was a seducer. He belongs to that rare company of mortals whose personal names have floated free from history, and we know what a… READ MORE
“Out of Sight, Out of Mind”
August 7, 2023
Sean M. Kelley— You’ve probably never heard of William Vernon, a lifelong resident of Newport, Rhode Island, but he was one of the biggest slave owners in American history. According… READ MORE
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