Corn and Colonization
December 5, 2019
Christine M. DeLucia— A kernel of corn, a chunk of quartz. Timothy Alden, Jr., tried to preserve these objects for posterity by donating them in March 1815 to the newly… READ MORE
Category: History
Mining and the Rise of Capitalism
December 2, 2019
Jeannette Graulau— From David Landes’s Prometheus Unbound to Giovanni Arrighi’s Origins of Our Times, scholars continue to quarrel over one of the most difficult questions of all time: the why,… READ MORE
White Supremacy and Privilege: Legacies of Slavery
November 22, 2019
Richard D. Brown— Everyone reading this enjoys privilege. Some possess athletic or intellectual gifts that set them apart; and those possessing sight, speech, hearing, and physical mobility are privileged. Those… READ MORE
A Tour de Bed
November 21, 2019
Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani— What did our ancestors do in bed? It’s an intriguing question. One that we, as archaeologists, realized nobody had sought to answer. Beds, after all,… READ MORE
The Politics of the Pilgrims and Puritans
November 19, 2019
Peter C. Mancall— We live in a moment when politics are rough, and not only in the United States. In the United Kingdom, where I am spending the academic year… READ MORE
Changing the Guard at Sea
November 15, 2019
Evan Mawdsley— For seventy-five years the United States has possessed what is, by a very considerable margin, the most powerful navy in the world. It has been an agent of… READ MORE
Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death
November 7, 2019
Lillian Faderman— Harvey Milk—charismatic, eloquent, a wit and a smart aleck—was one of the first openly gay men to be elected to any political office anywhere. On November 18, 1977,… READ MORE
Will They Swing the Thick Stick?
November 5, 2019
Martin Pugh— I spent 1969 to 1971 on Voluntary Service Overseas as a Lecturer in European History at the Aligarh Muslim University in India. It was an exciting time politically… READ MORE
Racial Passing in America
November 4, 2019
Adele Logan Alexander— Over the years, the practice of “passing” for white has variously been considered wicked, cowardly, deceptive, essential, all or none of the above by much of the… READ MORE
Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution
October 31, 2019
Yehudah Mirsky— Though he died in 1935, Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook (Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook) still towers in contemporary Israeli politics and Jewish spirituality; neither can properly be understood without… READ MORE
From 9/11 to 9/11: The Widening of the Atlantic