History
Story Stream
Why History Is Always Political January 01, 2025
At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support ...
History, According to Ridley Scott November 22, 2024
Just a year after the release of Napoleon, Ridley Scott is back with another historical epic, Gladiator II, the sequel to arguably his magnum opus. The original Gladiator had a lot of things going for it—compelling performances from Russell Crowe and...
Time Is Never Time at All: Why the 1990s Matter November 21, 2024
Calendars to the contrary, most people who talk about the 1990s close the decade with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This is telling: the bliss of the ’90s was American bliss, and the victory over history posited by Francis Fukuyama, Py...
Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence November 21, 2024
I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of ...
The Moral Muscle of the Great Rafael Nadal November 20, 2024
These days, one of the few areas of life where I share a genuine interest with the high school seniors I teach, is collegiate and professional sports.I am almost fifty years old. My students are only seventeen. I have been married for over twenty-fiv...
Hyperamerica November 20, 2024
Jean Baudrillard’s description of America as a “primitive society” with no “ancestral territory” of historically accumulated meaning immediately brings to mind photographer Edward Burtynsky’s widely-memed image of sprawling Exxon gas stations and McD...
Coming Undone November 19, 2024
Writing, it’s been said, remains unique because it is the only medium that can use its own form to investigate itself; that is, the art and the criticism that seeks to understand the art share the same ground. (Where is photography’s essay on the ima...
Reclaiming Ted Hughes November 19, 2024
Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I r...
Axis of Deception November 18, 2024
Making sense of the geopolitical landscape after 1989 would be hard enough without the self-inflicted fantasy that ideology, and thus history, had reached its final resting place. Once the infamous Iron Wall pulverized into the dustbin of history, We...
Everyone Still Wants to Believe in Mike Tyson November 18, 2024
Mike Tyson stands alone in an empty ring, throwing punches at ghosts. The crowd screams his name, but he doesn't hear them anymore. At fifty-eight, his muscles still ripple beneath flabby, weathered skin, but the speed and movement that actually made...
The History of Wokeness November 14, 2024
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken franc...
The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 November 14, 2024
Gripping novels and short stories, eye-opening histories, moving memoirs, and more. These are the books that entertained and enlightened us....
The Sun Also Sets November 13, 2024
The Library of America is something of a publishing curiosity. Its declared aim is to preserve America’s literary heritage “by publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.” Yet, unlike those...
A History of R.E.M. November 12, 2024
R.E.M. grew out of the vibrant music scene of Athens, Georgia, in 1980. Lead singer Michael Stipe, a recent transplant from the St. Louis suburbs, was taking art classes at the University of Georgia and singing in a kitschy cover band when he met rec...
The Many Forms of Rachel Cusk November 04, 2024
To judge by the critical response, Rachel Cusk’s new novel has left readers feeling betrayed. The nature of the betrayal depended upon what aspect of her work the critic once esteemed. For Dwight Garner of the New York Times, reviewing Parade meant r...
Tim Burton's Dark Nights November 01, 2024
Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns might be the perfect Halloween movies. They were big successes back in 1989 and 1992, grossing together more than a billion dollars (adjusted for inflation). They are fun popcorn movies, but also weird artistic ...
The History of History October 22, 2024
Historiography, the history of history, is a richly complex subject, which asks why history has been written the way it has. Ever mindful of the truth factor in the portrayal of the past, it seeks out the ways it has been told and the most accurate w...
The Loneliness of the Bullfighter October 18, 2024
The most frequently used word in the new film by director Albert Serra is “balls,” but almost as frequently used is “truth.” Following the killing of a bull in which the subject of the film, the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, took near-i...
How the WNBA Became the Most Exciting League in Sports October 17, 2024
Before this year, the last WNBA All-Star Game I covered in person was in 2009 at Mohegan Sun, the casino off I-95 that has been home to the Connecticut Sun since 2003. I’d paid my own way to be there, and I never got paid for the story I published ab...
Megalopolis’ Bad History October 15, 2024
Though the refrain “Drain the swamp!” might be a favourite of Donald Trump’s, Cicero made the rhetorical overture first, circa 43 BC. I am glad this has not been made known to Francis Ford Coppola, whose recent film Megalopolis finds the denouement o...
A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre October 10, 2024
Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo t...
A People’s History of Free Speech October 10, 2024
There is a well-established tendency in American politics to declare whatever problem we happen to be facing at the moment to be an “unprecedented” one. We do this, I think, to signal that the problem is serious and requires our urgent attention. But...
Blue Walls Falling Down October 09, 2024
An Excerpt from Blue Walls Falling Down: A NovelStella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this stand-alone novel (and loose sequel), set after Blake abruptly—and inexplicably—breaks...
The Silencing of Sylvia Plath October 09, 2024
In the afterword to Loving Sylvia Plath, a book detailing the abuse that Plath suffered at the hands of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, the literary scholar Emily Van Duyne recounts that when she started the book, a friend told her that she had to ...
Clan of the Cave Bore October 09, 2024
Creation Lake is a novel that wants to be many contradictory things to many people all at the same time: It is a spy novel and a satire of a spy novel; a retro “novel of ideas” in a mid-20th-century style that’s also an absurdist postmodern novel of ...
Citizen Nation: An Intimate Look at Students and Teachers October 08, 2024
Feeling down about the state of American politics? Citizen Nation, a four-part documentary series premiering on PBS this week, provides a dose of civic inspiration that will leave you feeling optimistic about the future of our democracy.Produced by t...
Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ October 07, 2024
Has there ever been an artist with worse judgment about his own talents and abilities than Francis Ford Coppola? Ever? The greatest realist in the history of cinema has spent his creative life consumed, for some reason, with making pictures that expl...
An Interview with Francis Ford Coppola October 04, 2024
Francis Ford Coppola hardly needs an introduction. As the lion of the New Hollywood, the outline of his career is well known. From work with Roger Corman to his first films in the 1960s, and then his Oscar for the screenplay of Patton (1970) and the ...
Serpents and Doves October 03, 2024
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, said the first-century BC Roman poet Lucretius. “Only religion can move men to such wickedness.” He didn’t know a tenth of it. From the biblical slaughter of the Amalekitesto pagans persecuting Christians before...
What I’ve Learned: Ina Garten October 02, 2024
Ina Garten, seventy-six, is one of the most beloved and successful figures in American culinary history. It all began in 1978, when she left her role writing nuclear-energy budgets at the White House to purchase Barefoot Contessa, a specialty food st...
The Chicago White Sox’s Terrible Season October 01, 2024
It could be worse for the Chicago White Sox, the worst baseball team in more than a century. No, really. It could be 1899. Jerry Reinsdorf, the stubborn, nearly nonagenarian owner of the White Sox, could be Frank Robison, the owner of the Cleveland S...
Hannah Arendt, Poet October 01, 2024
For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgen...
The Madness of 'Megalopolis' October 01, 2024
I attended a very special, and very strange, preview screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis a few days ahead of its official release. Before the film ran, the screening audience was treated to what was surely meant to be a great privilege, a...
The Rise of Post-Literate History September 09, 2024
The English historian J.A. Froude was famously gloomy about the ultimate prospects for his chosen branch of literature. “To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult,” he said. “It is impossible.” Froude’s words came to mind the...
The Case for Life on Mars September 09, 2024
Robert Zubrin’s The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet (2024) is a remarkable book. It’s notionally about colonising Mars and contains plenty of maths, and many diagrams and technical disquisitions outlining how that will be acco...
Celebrating the Centennial of the Most Underappreciated American of Our Time September 06, 2024
The following essay is adapted from the recently released book Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans (HarperCollins) September 7th marks the one-hundredth birthday of one of the most extraordinary and inspiring...
iThink Therefore iAm September 06, 2024
Steve Jobs named his company “Apple” after a pleasant trip to an apple orchard. The bite mark in the logo was added to give the silhouette a sense of scale, lest someone think it a cherry. Yet that name and that symbol, evoking consumption of the for...
American Men’s Tennis Is Partying Like It’s 2009 September 06, 2024
What were you doing in the summer of 2009? Appraising Bradley Cooper’s comedic chops in The Hangover? Wondering if Obama could really get it together to pass a health-care bill? Collecting unemployment thanks to that pesky global recession? Look, the...
Language and Leonard Michaels September 05, 2024
All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! —Elif BatumanCatachresis leads to anthropophagy. —David Bentley HartOrdinary people have a right to feel harassed when their language is criticized. We have grammar school for that kind of thing afte...
An Interview With Jon Lauck September 05, 2024
JMC Resident Historian Elliott Drago sat down with JMC Network Scholar Jon Lauck to discuss his new book, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900....
Rachel Kushner’s Surprising Swerve September 04, 2024
“Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung,” Rachel Kushner writes in The Hard Crowd, her 2021 essay collection. “People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose...
The Esoteric Wokeness of ‘Ancient Aliens’ September 02, 2024
The History Channel series Ancient Aliens, which will soon conclude its 20th season, pioneered an increasingly influential brand of pseudo-history, also on display in the recent Netflix production Ancient Apocalypse. Both shows gain their appeal simu...
Bring Back The Culture of Debate! April 09, 2024
Not long ago, I finished Tricia Romano’s oral history of The Village Voice, which was once America’s premier alternative newspaper. Even if you don’t care much about the Voice, you’ll find yourself wading through a half century of fascinating, explos...
C. S. Lewis was Right on History April 09, 2024
The study of C. S. Lewis’s interpretations of history is undergoing something of a revival, though more scholarship remains needed. As K. Alan Snyder and Jamin Metcalf have demonstrated in Many Times and Many Places: C. S. Lewis and the Value of Hist...
The New Defenders of the Faith April 09, 2024
This past year’s National Book Awards gala presented an ironic, yet at this point increasingly familiar scene: Held in the glittering halls of Cipriani’s on Wall Street, the attendees—dressed in their finest, dining at one of New York’s famed upscale...
Why 'Carrie' Is Still Scary April 08, 2024
There are two great origin stories in the history of horror fiction. The first took place in Switzerland in 1816, but it began with a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Ash from Mount Tambora wrapped the planet in shade, leading to “th...
Shogun: A Swashbuckling Show That Cares About History April 08, 2024
It’s quite difficult to make a generalized statement about the type of person who would enjoy watching FX’s Shogun. And that speaks to the show’s strengths. The limited series—available on Hulu and FX—has become a certified hit with the highest numbe...
The Duplicity of Percival Everett’s Literary Worlds April 08, 2024
The name of Percival Everett’s twelfth novel Erasure (2001), upon which last year’s American Fiction, the debut film by Cord Jefferson is based, is ambiguous in ways that may not immediately seem obvious. A whole industry exists to draw attention to ...
Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage April 05, 2024
Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history. ...
The Best Books of 2024 (So Far) April 04, 2024
The year may still be young, but 2024 has already brought a treasure trove of surprising new books. Multiple celebrated first-time authors have returned with highly anticipated, ambitious follow-up novels. Memoir and reportage are skillfully blended ...
Keeping the Republic April 04, 2024
“The Constitution Is Broken And Should Not Be Reclaimed.” This headline from a New York Times editorial written by two law professors (from Harvard and Yale), is simply a more hyperbolic expression of a point of view that has become increasingly prom...
Sigmund Freud, C.S. Lewis, and a Great Madness April 03, 2024
Ambiguity is, in a neat mental onomatopoeia, a difficult word to define. But to begin to understand a piece of art like the film Freud’s Last Session, define it we must, and religious artists would do well to try to understand the film.The film imagi...
The World Still Loves (Yesterday’s) America April 03, 2024
In a 2023 interview, the American author Amor Towles explained his literary approach as follows: “Certainly the ambition is to create a work that will resonate, that is open to all and will resonate with many as the goal.”...
Beyoncé Won’t Burn Down the Barn with 'Cowboy Carter' April 03, 2024
Here she comes round again, the horse goddess. When Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” in the summer of 2022—a paean to house music and disco, and to the Black queer people who invented them—the album cover featured the artist perched on a glittering be...
Gateway to Statesmanship April 03, 2024
In Gateway to Statesmanship, John A. Burtka IV, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, seeks to revive the tradition of mirror-for-princes literature, a project both timely and timeless. Criticism and distrust of political leaders are no...
'Carrie' at 50 April 02, 2024
Unfortunately, I came of age during the “sexy Halloween” era. The annual festival of all things frightening was becoming gaudier, more candy-strewn and American. But it was the Noughties, so it was also enthusiastically promoting the idea of young wo...
The DH Is Universal, but Good DHs Are Rare April 02, 2024
Dave Dombrowski’s first full season with the Boston Red Sox was also David Ortiz’s last. Hired in the middle of the 2015 campaign as president of baseball operations, Dombrowski couldn’t know the next spring that Ortiz was set for one of the greatest...
"Keeping the Republic" by Dennis Hale & Marc Landy April 01, 2024
Keeping the Republic is an eloquent defense of the American constitutional order and a response to its critics, including those who are estranged from the very idea of a fixed constitution in which “the living are governed by the dead.” Dennis Hale a...
Back Home Again April 01, 2024
The story begins in a hotel or motel, where the narrator, a twenty-something only child, has had a disturbing dream involving his or her mother. The novel, introduced by this scene and ending with what follows it, consists otherwise in a long analeps...
Godzilla, Like You’ve Never Seen Him April 01, 2024
“I’m“I’m sorry, but we can’t admit a visitor from within the Hudson.”The Intrepid Museum is one of the most fascinating tourist attractions in Manhattan: a World War II–era aircraft carrier that houses an expansive collection of fighter jets, bombers...
