Category Archives: History

Jamie Martin is an American historian of international political economy whose scholarship traces the origins of global economic governance to the imperial conflicts and economic crises of the early twentieth century. He holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor of … Continue reading →

David Garrow stands where two worlds meet that no longer trust each other. He came up inside the civil rights history establishment and won its highest prize. He ends up in the magazines that establishment scorns. His social set runs … Continue reading →

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) writes the most widely read radical history in American life and spends fifty years arguing that the historian’s job includes taking sides. He grows up poor, fights in a world war, drops napalm on a French town, … Continue reading →

Sheila Miyoshi Jager (b. 1963) writes history at the intersection of war and memory. She holds the chair in East Asian studies at Oberlin College, and she has spent more than two decades on a single question. How do nations … Continue reading →

Robert Caro (b. 1935) holds a central place in modern American nonfiction. He turned political biography into an instrument for examining the hidden structure of democratic power. Over more than five decades he fused investigative reporting, literary realism, oral history, … Continue reading →

Ylae historian Paul Kennedy (b. 1945) restored grand scale to the study of geopolitical power, imperial decline, and the link between economic capacity and military force. He was born in Wallsend, Northumberland, and educated at Newcastle University and St Antony’s … Continue reading →

A list of topics historians avoid serves as a map of contemporary moral geography. The scholar who wishes to understand his own profession can learn more from this map than from any methodology textbook. The shape of avoidance reveals where … Continue reading →

Clinton Rossiter committed suicide in 1970 at age 52 having spent two decades explaining how a liberal republic survives. His core argument was temperamental before it was institutional. In Conservatism in America (1955), he described a pragmatic disposition rooted in … Continue reading →