Incoherent Heroism
Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes will be a monument to randomness and a lazy, perhaps unthinking, version of the ideology he is supposed to despise.
Spring 2025
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Who Segregated America?
Federal housing policies contributed to the segregation of American cities in the twentieth century. But it was private interests that led the way.
How to Tell the History of the Democrats
What connection does the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have to the party of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?
Know Your Enemy: Twenty Years of Terror, with Spencer Ackerman
National security reporter Spencer Ackerman explains how the War on Terror laid the groundwork for Trump.
Know Your Enemy: Living at the End of Our World, with Daniel Sherrell and Dorothy Fortenberry
What does it feel like to imagine the future as climate catastrophe looms?
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.
Arguments on the Left: U.S. History
Three short essays from Michael Kazin, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Barbara Ransby.
Racism’s Roots and Branches
Racism in the United States is not mainly about individual bias but about divisions forged long ago by the super-exploitation and political dispossession of racialized groups.
An American Conception of Justice
Historians have amply demonstrated how central racism has been to the formation and reformation of the United States. But many of those same ideas and institutions have also been vital to combating white supremacy.
Know Your Enemy: Buckley for Mayor, with Sam Tanenhaus
William F. Buckley Jr. biographer Sam Tanenhaus digs into the National Review founder’s 1965 run for mayor of New York City.
Know Your Enemy: After Nationalism, with Samuel Goldman
An interview with political theorist Samuel Goldman on “being American in an age of division.”
Culture War in the Classroom
It is time for educators to go on the offensive against the conservative campaign to ban “critical race theory” from schools.
The Conservative Court
Since the Nixon era, the Supreme Court’s treatment of poverty and racial justice has made it a consistent enemy of society’s most marginalized.
The Pandemic Risk Shift
In the face of COVID-19, the political response has been at best temporary relief and at worst indifference. What we need going forward is not just better public health measures, but a response to the economic insecurities and policy failures that it laid bare.
Majority-Minority Myths
It’s time to let go of the belief that changing demographics will bring about a progressive America.
