A quarter of the century is behind us; what the next 75 years has in store is anyone’s guess. Thank goodness we’re in the history business, where everything has already happened and we know what to make of it. Or do we?
Each January, we Bunk editors take stock of the many hundreds of history pieces we collected on Bunk over the previous 12 months, and set ourselves the very challenging task of naming our 40 favorites. Reflecting on our final picks this year, we noticed a structural through line: all of them, in one way or another, seemed to be revisiting something with fixed meaning in people’s minds, and upending, at least a little, what they may have thought they knew about that thing.
As you’ll see in this year’s Bunk Top 40, these reconsiderations run the gamut from biography to literary criticism to political theory to archival deep-dives. We’ve organized them, in no particular order, based on the topics they tackle, but invite you to jump around through the list. All of the pieces there offer valuable and carefully crafted insights not only about the history that has shaped our present, but also about the ways we think about the American past.
Our list, it’s worth mentioning, is not entirely representative of the Bunk archive. It does not include book reviews or pieces longer than 6,000 words — though you will find plenty of excellent instances of each of those elsewhere on our site. But we’re confident that there’s enough here to keep you busy at least until spring, and hope that you learn as much from these terrific pieces as we have. We extend our congratulations and appreciation to all of their authors, but also to the many other talented writers whose work we included on Bunk this year. Here’s to another year of rethinking what we thought we knew.
See our annual Best-of roundups from previous years.
