Tag: History

“Ever since I was five years old,” wrote opera singer–turned–Buddhist lama Alexandra David-Néel, “I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown.”

How Cecelia Watson learned to stop worrying and love the semicolon.

What a 19th-century scammer can teach us about women, lying, and economic boom-and-bust cycles

Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do.

Summer Brennan considers the art and ritual of reinvention in the history of Notre Dame cathedral, and its witness to a Parisian millennium.

While envisioning the darkest of futures and grappling with mortality, the English writer retreated to an idyllic Scottish isle to write Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston gave Langston Hughes a lift to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie.” It was one of most fortuitous hangouts in literary history.

In 1935, a group of New York communists boarded a German luxury liner during a lavish sending-off party attended by celebrities, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Their goal: capture the swastika.

On two tours of the South, taken 20 years apart, Pete Candler uncovers truths about his family and the place he comes from.

This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about pasts and futures, and how lineages stretch across time.

Daniel Immerwahr says studying the history of the Greater United States opens our eyes to how “racism has shaped the actual country itself. The legal borders of the country, but also the borders of the heart.”

“We, as family, got so much from their trash. I never wanted to forget that I was the janitor’s kid before I was anything else.”

It started in Eureka, then it spread. Up and down the Pacific Coast, white mobs turned on Chinese-Americans.

Historian Tiffany Watt Smith argues that schadenfreude, the joy we derive from another’s misfortune, is just a natural part of the very complex emotional responses we have as human beings.

“Our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. Our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”

Women who spoke too angrily or too publicly were punished in cruel and unusual ways.

Sarah Moss’s tale of Iron Age reenactors and parental abuse is her way of addressing Brexit. “Putting the skulls of the ancestors up in some attempt to hold back history never works.”

The world-changing potential of a Green New Deal

As the Civil War loomed, weapons — like the recently invented bowie knife and rifles that were shipped to Kansas hidden in crates labeled as bibles — became complex political symbols.

After finding a note left by his grandfather, Aram Mrjoian considers how writing about the Armenian diaspora could help prevent history from being forgotten.

What will it take to get women’s baseball the recognition it deserves?

Telling Washington’s story without erasing the people and lands that preoccupied him leads to important new questions; like, just how consequential for American history was the first president’s addiction to land speculation?

In the “bizarre and horrifying world” of the early modern Caribbean, maroons and pirates both prized their freedom above all else. And sometimes they worked together to safeguard it.

Carolita Johnson reviews the ugly history of rape being weaponized — and politicized — as a means of silencing women.

One of the first decisions any tourist had to make when crossing the German border in the mid-1930s was whether or not to “Heil Hitler.”

Merve Emre on the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

I believed that there was no music existing in the world with an unbroken connection to its original context. I was wrong.

“Imagine realizing one day that you’re a Beatle. Think about how you might decide to handle that for the next 50, 60, 70 years.”

Even if one of the last surviving Tolstoyan communes has fallen short of Leo Tolstoy’s ideals, it’s still turned into something meaningful. It’s a place for people who don’t want to be found.

Allegations that Richard Nixon beat his wife, Pat Nixon, have circulated for decades without serious examination by the journalists who covered his presidency. It’s time to look more closely at what’s been hiding in plain view.