Podcast Hillbilly Highway July 22, 2024 Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. Read More
Essay Volatile waters, fluid histories July 12, 2024 It can be depressing these days to read about the state of the world鈥檚 water supplies. This is a global problem, but it is undoubtedly most acute in the so-called global south, where population is growing fastest and water infrastructures are least robust. As pressing as these challenges are today, they have a long history. Read More
Podcast Puerto Rico May 24, 2024 Jorell Mel茅ndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago鈥檚 people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. Read More
Interview Michael A. Cook on A History of the Muslim World May 15, 2024 Over the years Michael Cook has accumulated a large fund of material in the course of teaching students about the history of the Muslim world. So what was he to do with it? Read More
Interview Jorell Mel茅ndez-Badillo on Puerto Rico: A National History April 12, 2024 Jorell Mel茅ndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago鈥檚 people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Puerto Rico April 09, 2024 Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Read More
Interview Martin Thomas on The End of Empires and a World Remade March 25, 2024 Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. Read More
Essay Learning from imperial violence February 22, 2024 Historians are supposed to feel lucky when our new books align closely with topics prominently in the news. I would welcome a little less relevance for 鈥淭hey Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence.鈥� Read More
Podcast The Dialectic Is in the Sea November 30, 2023 Beatriz Nascimento (1942鈥�1995) was a poet, historian, artist, and political leader in Brazil鈥檚 Black movement, an innovative and creative thinker whose work offers a radical reimagining of gender, space, politics, and spirituality around the Atlantic and across the Black diaspora. Read More
Essay Approaching 2024: A perspective on opposition and democracy from Indian history November 08, 2023 Next year, the world鈥檚 largest democracy will head to the polls. Narendra Modi鈥檚 dominant ethnomajoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies will seek to win a third straight victory in India鈥檚 General Election. At this crucial crossroads, it is worth reflecting upon the history of one opposition party during the original era of one-party dominance. Read More
Podcast American Classicist November 03, 2023 Edith Hamilton (1867鈥�1963) didn鈥檛 publish her first book until she was sixty-two. But over the next three decades, this former headmistress would become the twentieth century鈥檚 most famous interpreter of the classical world. Read More
Essay Bidenomics and the Hillbilly Highway October 12, 2023 No region in the country has witnessed a greater decline in its manufacturing employment rate during the twenty-first century than the southeast. Regional deindustrialization, as much if not more so than the politics of racial resentment, explains the current era of one-party Republican rule in the South. Read More
Essay Dog diplomacy October 03, 2023 The habit of judging a political figure by their dog may seem to be a distinctively medieval preoccupation. Yet it is by no means alien to modern political discourse. Read More
Podcast Fool: In Search of Henry VIII鈥檚 Closest Man September 28, 2023 In some portraits of Henry聽VIII聽there appears another, striking figure鈥攁 gaunt and morose-looking man with a shaved head and, in one case, a monkey on his shoulder. Read More
Essay The joke鈥檚 on whom? September 19, 2023 Amidst the uproar that ensued after the incident at the Oscars ceremony last year, there were writers and reporters who pointed out that Chris Rock was exercising the age-old tradition of the 鈥渇ool鈥檚 license.鈥� If we actually go to the historical record on court and household fools, then we find an even more interesting, but also more complex, backdrop to the discussion on whether it is right or not to get angry at a comedian for making a joke. Read More
