Prologue: Our Time
May 4, 2023
In a small front room, amid the unfamiliar smells of Gauloise tobacco smoke and strong black coffee, I sit with my French host family staring at a small black-and-white television… READ MORE
Tag: european history
Chemical Lace and Connecting St. Gallen to New York and New Jersey
November 29, 2022
A New York Times best art book of 2022! Emma Cormack — Now on view at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York, the exhibition Threads of Power: Lace from… READ MORE
Casanova for Our Time: An Interview with Leo Damrosch
July 28, 2022
The life of the iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) has never been told in the depth it deserves. An alluring representative of the Enlightenment’s shadowy underside, Casanova was an aspiring… READ MORE
COP26: THE PROBLEM OF RESOURCES IN EARLY MODERN TIMES
November 11, 2021
Henry Kamen, author of Early Modern European Society, recounts the debate over resources and the themes of conservation taking root across Europe in early modern times. These issues are still relevant… READ MORE
The Global Indies
August 3, 2021
Ashley L. Cohen— On a winter evening a man sits by his fireside, waiting for the serene quiet of his country retirement to be interrupted by the delivery of a… READ MORE
“Come to London, to plaguy London”
July 22, 2021
Margarette Lincoln— So wrote John Donne, poet and priest, who described London in the 1600s as “a place full of danger and vanity and vice,” neatly encapsulating its horror and… READ MORE
“Where Bad’s the Best, Bad Must Be the Choice”
July 21, 2021
Emily Cockayne— Marginal foodstuffs were eaten in dearth years when regular supplies dwindled. There were fewer opportunities for hedgerow foraging, mushroom picking and rabbiting in the cities than there were… READ MORE
The Gin Palace
July 19, 2021
Lee Jackson— The emergence of the ‘gin palace’ in the 1830s, on the cusp of the Victorian era, seems a good place to start. These alluring drinking establishments, adorned with… READ MORE
Richard III
July 15, 2021
Michael Hicks— It is half a millennium since Richard III (1483–5) was king. He is traditionally regarded as the last of England’s medieval monarchs – 14th and last of the… READ MORE
Göring’s Man in Paris
July 13, 2021
Jonathan Petropoulos— At the start of my sabbatical in the summer of 2000, I was living in Munich, making it easier to contact Lohse. I had his telephone number and… READ MORE
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