Tocqueville and Us
People joining a political movement don’t usually consider its logic or consequences; they react to an injustice or grievance.
Eric Clifford Graf
· 9 min read
History
A collection of 359 posts
Why Is the Society for American Archaeology Promoting Indigenous Creationism?
The most expansive interpretations of NAGPRA’s provisions now serve to place Indigenous oral traditions, which typically include religious stories, on equal footing with traditional forms of scientific evidence such as DNA analysis.
Elizabeth Weiss and James W. Springer
· 16 min read
How the (Much Maligned) Mongol Horde Helped Create Russian Civilization
The Jochid khans considered the Russian principalities part of their dominion.
Marie Favereau
· 9 min read
White Lotus, Red Dragon—China’s History of Millenarian Dissent
When one woman refused and snapped at them to “go away,” they attacked her with a chair and mop handle.
Aaron Sarin
· 14 min read
Black Lives Matter and the Psychology of Progressive Fatalism
There is nothing wrong with elevating anti-racism in one’s own life. But there is something wrong with imposing one’s moral reality upon total strangers.
Samuel Kronen
· 18 min read
Book Burning at Midnight, May 10th, 1933
Following the Nazis’ defeat by the Allies, the imagery lived on. In succeeding decades, projections of the book burning were never long out of sight or reference.
Thomas Doherty
· 7 min read
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe—A Review
A review of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson. Allen Lane, 496 pages (May 2021) Viewed from a certain angle, history appears to be the legacy of our errors—the record of humanity risking too much and anticipating too little, getting things wrong and getting them wrong all
Jared Marcel Pollen
· 10 min read
Interrogating Jane
In fact, the single most common technique for insisting that Austen is anti-slavery is for the critic to draw an equivalence between slavery and her depiction of social class, or her portrayal of the status of women.
Lona Manning
· 12 min read
The Ugly History of Rape Panics
As sexual violence was reaching historic lows, the narrative was demanding the opposite. The definition of sexual violence began to be broadened, and so the numbers grew.
Jerry Barnett
· 11 min read
Stopped Cold: Remembering Russia's Catastrophic 1939 Campaign Against Finland
Many Finnish soldiers felt pity for their opponents, prodded into battle by merciless commissars.
Sean McMeekin
· 13 min read
Rinaldo Walcott’s On Property—A Review
Indeed, the title misleads: On Property focuses more on the historical threads linking the slave plantations to the abuses of modern policing than it does on its purported subject matter.
Jonathan Salem-Wiseman
· 8 min read
Anti-Colonialism's Bad History
Crimes, no matter how heinous, cannot be passed onto the progeny like some modern variant of the original sin, condemning them to unending purgatory.
Marian L. Tupy
· 6 min read
The Campaign to Thwart Paleogenetic Research Into North America's Indigenous Peoples
In the north, the Maritime Archaic gave way to Pre-Dorset Palaeoeskimos (as they are known in the literature) that had recently arrived from Siberia.
Bruce Bourque
· 20 min read
Houses of Horrors
In some former British colonies, confronting the dispossession and murder of native peoples has prompted efforts at apology and restitution.
John Lloyd
· 14 min read
Fulton and the Case Against Normalcy
A long-ago speech by a foreign dignitary may hold the key to recovering some lost wisdom about how America came into this role in the first place.
Brian Stewart
· 11 min read