anachronism

Jonathan Gienapp's attack on originalism deserves a serious response.

Gladiator and Gladiator II have little to do with the Roman past. But they have a great deal to do with the American present.

Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.

When we try to recover the “original meaning” of constitutional amendments, we begin with deeply engrained premises about the nature of what we're looking for.

Barely-disguised hostilities sometimes belied the rebels’ declared identity as the United States of America.

A writer of haunting, uncategorizable songs, she once seemed poised for runaway fame. But only decades after she disappeared has her music found an audience.

The history of race has animated a highly contentious, sometimes fractious debate among scholars.

The past does not speak to us; we speak for the past.

It's a myth that the Founders opposed the regulation of deadly weapons.

Gravely inaccurate 19th-century depictions of the destruction of Rome are used to illustrate parallels between Rome and the U.S.

Buttigieg believes he probably won’t be the first gay president if he’s elected in 2020.

A consideration of four recent books that attempt to contend with the rise of Trumpism at home and abroad.

The Spotify and Ancestry partnership proposes to entertain users based on the narrowest possible conception of who they are.

The grand lesson of John McCain's life should be that heroic politics is a broken politics.

A set of 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of millions of dollars’ worth of treasure buried in rural Virginia.

Were the founders really warning us about Trump, or were they just playing politics, too?

Nixon? Reagan? Jackson? Historical analogies are simplistic, misleading—and absolutely essential.

If everyone is breaking records, then who goes to Canton?

A new British television series, Jamestown, set off a minor public debate about just how rebellious women could be in the past.

Behind a quiet house museum are anti-abortion activists with a mission: to claim America’s most famous historical feminist as their own.

The project of “reclamation and celebration” proceeds from an impulse to rediscover black Greats who by force of their own will make “change.”

And the origins of the term “Kafkaesque.”

Conservatives’ veneration for the founders opens the door for a secular vision for America’s public schools.

How to understand Adam Smith’s politics.

Few who are memorialized in stone could fully pass moral muster today. Is that a problem?

The many lives of ferocious cartoonist and illustrator Arthur Szyk at a jewel of a show at the New-York Historical Society.

Rather than censuring the legacies of our ancestors, we should work to make our descendants proud.