Sales in the railway reserve flooded the market with cheap land sold off to speculators who retained title for decades before ...

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But putting forward a theory of progress is not only a way of settling a theoretical dispute; it’s also a move with real stakes. As confidence in collective life wanes, progress can seem not merely ...

When Andrea Dworkin died of heart disease in 2005, at age fifty-eight, U.S. feminism lost its most inflammatory voice. Between Woman Hating (1974), her transcultural examination of women in history ...

Terry Bouricius remembers the moment he converted to democracy by lottery. A bookish Vermonter, now sixty-eight, he was elected to the State House in 1990 after working for years as a public official ...

U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and ...

Like U.S. history, classical music has become a new front in the culture wars as musicians and music institutions grapple with the legacies of racism. With most performing arts organizations shuttered ...

I would like to stage a fight between two different accounts of the current political landscape—what’s been called the “post-truth” era, the infodemic, the end of democracy, or perhaps most accurately ...

Last August the New York Times Magazine released a special issue they called the 1619 Project, which uses the 400th anniversary of the arrival of “20 and odd” enslaved Africans in Virginia to recast ...

“Very fine people”—fathers, husbands, and sons, as well as mothers, wives, and daughters—have always been central to the work of white supremacy. White supremacy is a language of unease. It does not ...