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Why Historical Analogy Matters

If the idea of historical incommensurability is right, then analogical reasoning in history becomes an impossibility.

The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts

A dispute between some scholars and the authors of NYT Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of U.S. society.

Preaching a Conspiracy Theory

The 1619 Project offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—not history.
AHA executive officers, 1889

White Supremacy in the Academy: The 1913 Meeting of the American Historical Association

The historical interpretations crafted by the men of the Dunning School might now be largely discredited and discarded. But their legacies remain.
Exhibit

The History of History

How historians and educators have written and taught about different eras of the American past.

Eric Foner’s Story of American Freedom

Eric Foner has helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.

Historians Write About a Different Jefferson Now: Four Books Show How Different

Four new books show how different, and maybe also why.
Artwork titled Notes from Tervuren, featuring a figure against a multicolored painted music sheet.

Talking Drums

On the relationship between African American music traditions and one of the most infamous slave revolts, the Stono Rebellion, in colonial South Carolina.
Drawing of Puritans.

How Should We Remember the Puritans?

In his new book, Daniel Rodgers not only offers a close reading of Puritan history but also seeks to rescue their early critique of market economy.
Pictures of people in collage form.

The Center Does Not Hold

Jill Lepore’s awkward embrace of the nation.

The Treason of the Elites

For much of our clerisy, the nation is an anachronism or disgrace.

The Real Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius

The inventor did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.

Story-Shaped Things

Historians tell stories about the past. A new book argues that those stories are often dangerously wrong.

The Mild, Mild West

H.W. Brands' new one-volume history of the American West reads too much like a movie we’ve already seen.

The Historical Profession's Greatest Modern Scandal, Two Decades Later

Emory professor Michael Bellesiles resigned in the midst of a political firestorm. He still stands by his work.

Writing the History of Capitalism with Class

The "new history of capitalism" cuts class politics at the expense of history.
Supreme Court building under dark rainclouds.
partner

Could Footnotes Be the Key to Winning the Disinformation Wars?

Armed with footnotes, we can save democracy.

How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism

The New York Times is right that slavery made a major contribution to capitalist development in the United States — just not in the way they imagine.
Cotton field.

How The 1619 Project Rehabilitates the ‘King Cotton’ Thesis

The New York Times’ series on slavery relies on bad scholarship to make an argument with an inauspicious history.
Painting of Santa Claus giving a sword to a Confederate cavalryman next to a dinosaur.

What Is Revisionist History?

What is revisionist history--and is it dangerous?
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy during the Pride 2014 parade in San Francisco, California.

Writing Gay History

How the story itself came out.

Against the Great Man Theory of Historians

Without accounting for the often-invisible work of others in his research, Robert Caro's new memoir is not so much inspiration as an exercise in self-celebration.

Jill Lepore on Early American Ideas of Nationalism

"Inevitably, the age of national bootblacks and national oyster houses and national blacksmiths produced national history books."
Cover of "These Truths"

New Yorker Nation

In Jill Lepore's "These Truths," ideas produce other ideas. But new ideas arise from thinking humans, not from other ideas.
Painting by Titus Kaphar entitled "Page 4 of Jefferson’s ‘Farm Book"

How Proslavery Was the Constitution?

A review of a book by Sean Wilentz's "No Property in Man," which argues that the document is full of anti-slavery language.

The Political Odyssey of Sean Wilentz

How one of America's original Bernie Bros became an outspoken critic of the left.

Julius Scott’s Epic About Black Resistance in the Age of Revolution

"The Common Wind" covers the radical world of black mariners, rebels, and runaways banding together to realize their freedom.

Muslims of Early America

Muslims came to America more than a century before Protestants, and in great numbers. How was their history forgotten?

On Robert Caro, Great Men, and the Problem of Powerful Women in Biography

Power and ambition in women are often hidden, buried, disguised, crushed, mocked, diminished, punished, or excoriated.
The Interface Message Processor that connected UCLA to ARPANET.

Communication Revolution

ARPANET and the development of the internet, 50 years later.

Eric Hobsbawm, the Communist Who Explained History

Hobsbawm saw his political hopes crumble. He used that defeat to tell the story of our age.

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