Essay Reaffirming human rights December 10, 2020 On December 19, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It took more than two years of intense, difficult negotiations, but the members of the drafting committee understood that they could not fail. Read More
Podcast College presidents and the struggle for Black freedom December 01, 2020 Some of America’s most pressing civil rights issues—desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech—have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Read More
Essay Looking at medieval objects November 17, 2020 A few years ago, I was in the Medieval Collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City examining one of the objects I was writing a book about when a father came by with two children, a boy of about 10 and a girl of 7 or 8. He was taking them to see the medieval armor in the next exhibit room. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Ravenna October 05, 2020 At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. Read More
Interview Judith Herrin on Ravenna September 29, 2020 At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. Read More
Interview Despina Stratigakos on Hitler’s Northern Utopia August 31, 2020 Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. Read More
Interview By Design | Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe August 24, 2020 Porcelain, once dubbed “white gold” after being reproduced by an eighteenth-century Saxon alchemist, may seem to us today like a quaint rarity, a beautiful relic confined to elegant china cabinets. But in Suzanne Marchand’s absorbing history, this translucent ceramic comes to life as a once-ubiquitous commodity linked to geopolitical upheaval and the global transformations of the last three centuries. Read More
Essay The Fourth of July, but not 1776: Independence and epidemics in Boston July 02, 2020 The Fourth of July that mattered most to Revolutionary Boston, the Cradle of Liberty, was not the one in 1776 when the thirteen united states issued a declaration of independence to a “candid world.” Rather, it occurred the year before, in 1775, when the stakes were highest for Boston and New England, and in the form of a much quieter and little-known document. Read More
Interview Adam Sutcliffe on What Are Jews For? July 02, 2020 What is the purpose of Jews in the world? The Bible singles out the Jews as God’s “chosen people,” but the significance of this special status has been understood in many different ways over the centuries. Read More
Essay Fighting the deportation machine June 24, 2020 Javier García Bautista had not been at his station for long on May 17 when someone in the carpentry department of the suburban-Los Angeles shoe factory where he worked yelled out, “The migra is here!” Read More
Essay Masada: A heroic last stand against Rome June 17, 2020 Two thousand years ago, 967 Jewish men, women, and children reportedly chose to take their own lives rather than suffer enslavement or death at the hands of the Roman army. Read More
Interview By Design | The Papers of Thomas Jefferson May 17, 2020 In a ceremony at the Library of Congress on May 17, 1950, President Harry S. Truman accepted the first volume of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, an ambitious project that would span multiple decades and vastly different modes of production. Read More
Essay Grace: A keyword for now and then April 07, 2020 Which are the keywords of our time? Black, Brexit, Climate, Trans? New words, old words that have changed, words that have switched users and come to mean different things from before. Read More
Essay James Baldwin’s reckless idea February 06, 2020 In 1961 James Baldwin found himself in the studios of WBAI radio in New York, looking into the eyes of Malcolm X. Malcolm was, by then, the most recognizable face associated with the Nation of Islam (NOI), a religious sect that was inspiring hope in the hearts of some and fear in the hearts of others. Read More
Essay Getting to know Nat Turner February 03, 2020 Nat Turner is known to history as a thirty-year-old Virginia slave who led a bloody rebellion that resulted in the death of fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. Beyond that, he is famous for being well-nigh unknowable. Read More
