Integrity and Defiance in Equal Measure
Percival Everett’s James, set in the nineteenth century, is a novel of the present moment—when legal measures that were once regarded as essential components of racial justice are being dismantled.
Winter 2025
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The South Has Got Something To Say
In recent books, Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Imani Perry offer divergent explanations of Southern inequality.
A Mother Alone
Jon Henry’s photography offers the hope that remembrance can spark political change.
Racial Metaphors
If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed little or nothing.
A Unified Story for a Divided World
Wars of position that pit race against class are tired.
This Is Who We Are
The rioters at the Capitol are part of an unbroken American tradition. Sweet talk about our “better angels” did not defeat them before and will not now.
Know Your Enemy: Not Even Past, with Jamelle Bouie
Matt and Sam are joined by New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie for a wide-ranging discussion of how conservatives (and liberals and leftists) use American history to make political claims in the present.
Kościuszko Knew That Black Lives Matter
“We are certain that had Kościuszko been resurrected, he would himself write Black Lives Matter in big bold letters across his statue.”
Can Conservatives Write Good U.S. History?
By not giving the battle against racism and for equality its due, Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope fails to explain how and for whom power was and continues to be wielded in America.
The Reparations Debate
How should the struggle for reparations for slavery fit into a broader political strategy for the left?
The First Abolitionists
Abolitionism is often depicted as an ineffectual campaign led by white liberals, but it was actually a radical, interracial movement—galvanized above all by the resistance of slaves themselves.
The Price of Life: From Slavery to Corporate Life Insurance
Coal embodies capitalism’s most telling paradox: that the most lucrative industries are often the most dangerous. And from the days of slavery to the present, corporations have found ways to profit from the resulting deaths.
Slavery on Screen 
The films about slavery that came out during the Obama years have given us more powerful and nuanced representations of slavery than we have seen before.
Kinetic Joy
In Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, a young woman explores her racial identity through a love of dance—and finds a different kind of history, one that is barely written down.
Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government, with Matthew Karp
An interview with Matthew Karp about his book, This Vast Southern Empire, and the international politics of American slavery.
