Tag
History
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“Recover, Replant, Return”: Talking Nuclear History, Writing, and Food with Kate Brown
“Were people in the past like me, did they feel like they were in some historic maelstrom? If they did, how did they scrape by?”
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Tech, Stones, and Stories: How the Violence of Border Tech is a Historical Matter
Border technologies live within loops of failure → crisis → fix → failure → crisis → fix, eternally to be tested. It will work, promise! Just wait for one more iteration.
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Borders Are War by Other Means
The border today is and is made through sociotechnical arrangements centering data in the regulation of racial difference.
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“A Second Enlightenment”: Greg Grandin on Latin America, the United States, and the Creation of Social-Democratic Modernity
“My books try to explain a tension.”
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“Independence and Abolition Went Hand in Hand”: Julia Gaffield on Jean-Jacques Dessalines
“Securing the first permanent, universal, and immediate abolition of slavery was Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s legacy.”
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Once upon a Time in Tenoxtitlan
Two novels published in 2024 return to some of the best-known, canonical figures and episodes from Mexico’s past.
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Are Species Timeless?: Talking with Bathsheba Demuth About the Arctic
“There was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic.”
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Secrets in the Stacks
A new book demonstrates that the skills taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance to the defense of democracy.
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Borders May Change, But People Remain
The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping the memories of these conflicts alive.
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A Heaven Reflected on Earth: The Golden Temple, Amritsar
Gleaming turrets reflect in the still water, just as, according to the Sikh faith, heaven is reflected on earth.
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A Peek Behind the Old Town’s Walls: Dubrovnik, Croatia
“On the top of the walls, I stopped to admire the panoramic Adriatic Sea views. Below, a basketball court abutted the walls, and kids were shooting hoops.”
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White Suburbs and Drug Wars
To understand the racism of the drug war, in other words, we must look to the ways policymakers sought to protect white suburban youth.
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Interpret or Judge?: John Guillory on the Future of Literary Criticism
“‘Professing criticism’ is a contradiction and maybe even an impossibility. I’d like to hope that it’s not, that it’s just an innovation, historically.”
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D.A.R.E. Is More Than Just Antidrug Education—It Is Police Propaganda
DARE lost its once hegemonic influence over drug education, but it had long-lasting effects on American policing, politics, and culture.
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Pieces of the Past at the Doctors House: Glendale, California
The house may appear as a mere physical artifact, but it contains larger stories of American migration and growth, reckonings with exclusion, and the advent of new technologies.
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Politics—Not Tech—Can Save Black Jobs from AI
Don’t plan to make individuals retrain for new jobs. Instead, build a society that upholds the lives of everyone.
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“Why Do We Go On Pretending?”: Theater at the End of the World
The theatre is where we go to remind ourselves that we are all dying together, and to live better for it.
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Haiti’s Blueprints of Black Sovereignty
How was a self-proclaimed Black nation to define its role in an Atlantic world deeply entwined with enslaved Black labor?
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Enemy of the State
Félix Darfour accused the post-independence Haitian republic with corruption. He lost his life for it.
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Counter-Plantation Nation
The language and culture of Kreyòl, as well as the Vodou religion, reveal a vision of Haitian sovereignty on behalf of those formerly enslaved.
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Haiti: What Sovereignty?
After winning independence, the West rushed to teach Haiti a lesson so that their revolutionary experience would not recur on the continent. Haiti suffers the repercussions of such attacks to this day.
