history
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For Men and By Men
Slate’s Rebecca Onion and Andrew Kahn analyze the overwhelming maleness of both the subjects and authors of history books, discussing their findings with book publishers: Our data set revealed some answers about the publishing of popular history that we expected:…
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Only the Lives Worth Saving
For JSTOR Daily, Tara Isabella Burton revisits Prohibition during the Coolidge administration, when the moral outrage that pushed for Prohibition didn’t extend to saving the lives of people dying from poisoned industrial alcohol: …[the] New York of the 1920’s viewed…
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Furthering Alexander Hamilton’s Hip-Hop Legacy
For The Muse at Jezebel, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd dives deep into Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton to find even more connections between the words of “the ten-dollar Founding Father without a father” and the literature of hip-hop.
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Change, but Not Too Much
Mensah Demary caps off the year at Catapult with an essay that reflects on the traditional New Year’s resolution and what our easy dismissing of these attempts to change says about us: I should probably write a few words about…
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History Is Addictive
For Public Books, David Kurnick explores how Elena Ferrante’s attention to history contributes to the addictive nature of her novels and is helping to “revive” realism: The addictive quality of the Neapolitan novels on which everyone agrees may finally derive from their…
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Weekly Geekery
The long dark history of socialist utopias. Get all the gadgets! Netflix binges are ruining the environment. Internet hate speech law.
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The Queen(s) of Fiction
I write historical fiction. Some consider this an outré craft. If literary fiction is Brooklyn, the historical novel is Queens. Over at the New York Times’s Sunday Book Review, Geraldine Brooks pens an essay on her experience recapturing the consciousness…
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Writing a Women’s History of Science
For Motherboard at VICE, Victoria Turk writes on the gender biases still present in writing histories of female scientists. Turk focuses on the legacies of Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, and even Florence Nightingale, whose roles as a statistician and social reformer…
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The Queer Holiday Blues
Lauren Gutterman writes for Notches, a journal on the history of sexuality, about the “holiday blues” documented in postwar queer literature. Gutterman’s examination of holiday-themed issues of queer literary publications finds that they’ve often focused on queer people’s exclusions from…
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The Science of the Supernatural
Certain people, Barrett decided, were… exquisitely attuned to vibrations that others could not perceive, to “forces unrecognized by our senses.” He considered these persons able to receive messages from super-normal spirit-beings existing in an intermediate state between the physical and…
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Killing Baby Hitler
Rebecca Onion writes for Aeon about taking the “what ifs” of history very seriously: In October 2015, when asked if, given the chance, he would kill the infant Hitler, the US presidential candidate Jeb Bush retorted with an enthusiastic: ‘Hell…
