Scott Spillman

On the scholarship and intellectual legacies of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, William Dunning and other academics.

Who decides how history gets written?

The general’s campaign through the South is known for its brutality against civilians. For the enslaved who followed his army, though, it was a shot at freedom.

Scott Spillman reviews Seth Rockman’s “Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.”

What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?

There is, and always has been, a vanishingly thin line between charismatic democratic rulers and charismatic authoritarians.

David Brion Davis’s philosophical history.