Never Apologize for Trying to Tell the Truth
Those who repress inconvenient facts or produce fictitious evidence to nourish a politically convenient story are simply not historians.
Jeffrey Herf
· 8 min read
History
A collection of 366 posts
Malthusian Theory Has Always Been False
Rethinking Limits: What Superabundance Gets Right About Human Progress.
Robert Zubrin
· 8 min read
The Infantilization of Culture and History
We should reject an unfalsifiable frame that can make anything and everything offensive or problematic, no matter how innocuous.
Alan S. Rome
· 9 min read
Shawls, Books, and Bombs
Reflections on Polish resistance.
Ben Sixsmith
· 8 min read
Indigenous Activists Are Targeting My Research. My Own University Is Helping Them
Academics who study ancient Paleoindian populations are increasingly being denied access to skeletons, artifacts, and even old x-rays and research reports. We need to start fighting back
Elizabeth Weiss
· 10 min read
The Roads Not Taken
A new book by Orlando Figes explores the role of Russian history in the Ukranian war.
John Lloyd
· 10 min read
Assault in Alabama
Revisiting the attack on Nat King Cole.
Thomas Doherty
· 10 min read
Slavery and Steam
The dangers of forfeiting societal sustainability.
David Foster
· 7 min read
The Classically Greek Roots of Civilizational Self-Doubt
The Greeks were the first of all peoples to look at themselves in the mirror.
Benedict Beckeld
· 10 min read
Troubadour at War
Leonard Cohen’s visit to Israel in its darkest hour.
Ari David Blaff
· 8 min read
The Opposite of Junk
A dozen journals left to us by my wife’s Scottish grandmother were destined for the recycling bin—until we took a look at what was inside.
Herman Goodden
· 11 min read
Science and Civil Liberties: The Lost ACLU Lecture of Carl Sagan
Around 1987, Sagan gave an uncannily prescient lecture to the Illinois state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Steven Pinker, Harvey Silverglate
· 15 min read
The Alchemist Emperor of Prague
As the Holy Roman Empire descended into religious conflicts, its Habsburg ruler surrounded himself with magicians, astrologers, and scryers.
Martyn Rady
· 8 min read
Conquering a Balkan Blood Feud—in Bovey, Minnesota
An American family descended from Serbian and Croatian immigrants finds a way to overcome old-world hatreds.
Jon Zobenica
· 15 min read
Israel’s Perilous Moment, Then and Now
Herf tells the complicated and often surprising story of the internal political struggles in Western capitals, as well as in the halls of the United Nations, that erupted at the end of the Second World War.
Sol Stern
· 14 min read