James Baldwin

Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest book preaches political fatalism. But black activism has always believed in the possibility of change.

Harold Ross founded The New Yorker as a comic weekly. A hundred years later, we’re doubling down on our commitment to the much richer publication it became.

John Andrew Jackson spent a night at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home as he fled north. Why do so few traces of his visit remain?

The terrific new doc “San Juan Hill” chronicles the 1960s land grab that gave the Metropolitan Opera a home, while scattering longtime residents.

In the wake of the 1964 Harlem riots, June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s plan to redesign the neighborhood suggested new possibilities for urban life.

The world-spanning art of the Harlem Renaissance.

Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built.

A new book exposes effects of anti-Black myth-making and calls for an end to the family policing system.

Harriet Beecher Stowe said that Josiah Henson’s life had inspired her most famous character. But Henson longed to be recognized by his own name.

The way we learn about our collective past is under attack thanks to new leadership at the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA).

On Audrey Clare Farley’s “Girls and Their Monsters.”

Two differing explorations of post-WWII culture, politics, and ideals.

Black identity is a reality, not an idea.

What will be the legacy of the Black Arts Movement? Ishmael Reed reflects on the transformation and growth of Black arts since the 1960s.

Two new books and one expanded edition of Gordon Parks' photographs look at the work of the photographer from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

The personal essay is the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

What my father saw in Mississippi.

Taking seriously the midlife crisis.

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

Racial blamelessness and the politics of forgetting.