Essay A new vocabulary for social life March 27, 2021 What if we lived in a society where women had the power to make the world anew? What would life look like today if women played a definitive part in governance and had the resources to create sustainable lives? Read More
Essay The hidden economic lives of women March 18, 2021 Women are everywhere in economic life, and nowhere very much in economic history. In Joseph Vernet鈥檚 great series of paintings of the 1750s and 1760s, the waterfronts of the ports of France are crowded with women pulling carts and selling fish, talking and bargaining. Read More
Interview Emma Rothschild on An Infinite History February 24, 2021 Marie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoul锚me in southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened. Yet, in 1764, she made her fleeting mark on the historical record. Read More
Podcast Listen in: White Freedom February 22, 2021 Available in audio, White Freedom聽traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white. Start listening here. Read More
Interview Book Club Pick: The Fire Is upon Us February 16, 2021 This month鈥檚 selection is The Fire Is upon Us by Nicholas Buccola. In this book, Buccola tells the unforgettable story of the historic debate at the Cambridge Union between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. Read More
Essay George Washington鈥檚 disillusionment February 15, 2021 Today is Presidents Day, a holiday established in the late nineteenth century to celebrate the greatest of America鈥檚 founders, George Washington. By the end of his life Washington himself was hardly in a celebratory mood when he reflected on the state of the country. Read More
Essay White freedom invades the US Capitol February 03, 2021 On January 6, 2021 a violent mob numbering several thousand individuals invaded the United States Capitol Building in Washington DC, seeking not only to physically attack and even murder members of Congress but more generally to impose by force the reelection of President Donald Trump and thus to overthrow the lawfully elected American government. Read More
Podcast White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea February 01, 2021 The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination.聽 Read More
Podcast Listen in: An Infinite History January 29, 2021 Marie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoul锚me in southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened. Yet, in 1764, she made her fleeting mark on the historical record through two documents. Read More
Essay Sherlock Holmes and the history of information January 28, 2021 Over Christmas week I reread Arthur Conan Doyle鈥檚 Sherlock Holmes stories. I had first read them as a child, working slowly through a worn red volume that contained them all. Read More
Video An Infinite History book trailer January 25, 2021 Watch the book trailer for An Infinite History鈥攁n innovative history of deep social and economic changes in France, told through the story of a single extended family across five generations. Read More
Essay Reaffirming human rights December 10, 2020 On December 19, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It took more than two years of intense, difficult negotiations, but the members of the drafting committee understood that they could not fail. Read More
Podcast College presidents and the struggle for Black freedom December 01, 2020 Some of America鈥檚 most pressing civil rights issues鈥攄esegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech鈥攈ave been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Read More
Essay Looking at medieval objects November 17, 2020 A few years ago, I was in the Medieval Collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City examining one of the objects I was writing a book about when a father came by with two children, a boy of about 10 and a girl of 7 or 8. He was taking them to see the medieval armor in the next exhibit room. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Ravenna October 05, 2020 At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. Read More
