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Booked: The War on Booze  

An interview with historian Lisa McGirr about her new book The War On Alcohol, and why Prohibition was more important than most people think.













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Booked: The Meaning of the Fourth of July  

Americans revere the Declaration of Independence, but most of us don’t read it. Timothy Shenk spoke with Danielle Allen about the document’s relevance for how we understand liberty and equality in the United States today.





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Booked #4: What Did Race Mean to W.E.B. Du Bois?  

Tim Shenk talked with Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, about how Du Bois’s experiences as a black American shaped his theories of race, and how his theories relate to politics then and now.









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The Long Shadow of Mont Pèlerin  

Once there was a golden age of democratic capitalism. Chastened by the Great Depression and cowed by vigorous labor movements, a generation of leaders forged a new type of political economy in the aftermath of the Second World War that united economic growth with robust welfare regimes. Then in the 1970s something went wrong. At least, that is how the story goes.



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Eric Hobsbawm and the Limits of Marxism  

While Hobsbawm will be remembered as a historian of singular gifts, his writings already seem less a harbinger of the shape of things to come than sterling examples of an older kind of scholarship at its best.