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The Islamic Republic Was Never Inevitable
With Iran’s theocracy under strain, a new history shows that its rise was mainly a stroke of bad luck.
by
Arash Azizi
via
The Atlantic
on
August 5, 2025
The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen
From a dying adviser to a clumsy editorial, the Revolution was a cascade of accidents and oversights.
by
Daniel Immerwahr
via
The New Yorker
on
August 4, 2025
partner
The Rise and Fall of Liberal Historiography
How historians changed their approach, from the 1960s to the present.
by
Gabriel Winant
via
HNN
on
February 11, 2025
Politics Is Personal
The 1946 elections were a disaster for Democrats—and the reason I was born.
by
Peter Quinn
via
Commonweal
on
December 24, 2024
The Debate Gaffe That Changed American History
And cost Gerald Ford the presidency.
by
Jeff Greenfield
via
Politico Magazine
on
May 9, 2024
Defanged
A journalistic view of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, work, and representation in American society.
by
Eric Foner
via
London Review of Books
on
September 28, 2023
What If There Was Never a Revolution?
A new book considers the possible alternative outcomes of the battles in America's war for independence.
by
Katrina Gulliver
via
Law & Liberty
on
May 2, 2023
Blundering on the Brink
The secret history and unlearned lessons of the Cuban missile crisis.
by
Vladislav Zubok
,
Sergey Radchenko
via
Foreign Affairs
on
April 3, 2023
Concrete Poetry: Thomas Edison and the Almost-Built World
A real (but mostly forgotten) patent conjures a world that could have been.
by
Anthony Acciavatti
via
The Public Domain Review
on
December 1, 2022
Do We Have the History of Native Americans Backward?
They dominated far longer than they were dominated, and, a new book contends, shaped the United States in profound ways.
by
David Treuer
via
The New Yorker
on
November 7, 2022
The Tyranny Of The Map: Rethinking Redlining
In trying to understand one of the key aspects of structural racism, have we constructed a new moralistic story that obscures more than it illuminates?
by
Robert Gioielli
via
The Metropole
on
November 3, 2022
“Mother Will Be Pleased”: "How It Feels to Be Run Over" (1900)
One of the earliest uses of intertitles, in this fin-de-siècle accident picture we can observe cinema discovering new forms of communication.
by
Hunter Dukes
via
The Public Domain Review
on
October 6, 2022
Stop Weaponizing History
Right and left are united in a vulgar form of historicism.
by
Arjun Appadurai
via
The Chronicle of Higher Education
on
September 27, 2022
What if Joseph Lane of Oregon had become President in 1861?
How would the presidency have looked under Joseph Lane, a Democrat, as opposed to Abraham Lincoln?
by
Max Longley
via
Emerging Civil War
on
August 14, 2022
Would These Undelivered Speeches Really Have Changed History?
At a time of upheaval, we want to believe that better leaders have the power to change the course of history. But counterfactuals are never simple.
by
Priya Satia
via
The New Republic
on
May 20, 2022
Forgetting the Apocalypse
Why our nuclear fears faded – and why that’s dangerous.
by
Daniel Immerwahr
via
The Guardian
on
May 12, 2022
What If… Historians Were Honest About Counterfactuals?
A single choice can branch out to infinite realities.
by
Adam R. Shapiro
via
Contingent
on
May 5, 2022
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Abolition Democracy
The enduring legacy and capacious vision of "Black Reconstruction."
by
Gerald Horne
via
The Nation
on
May 3, 2022
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?
by
Michael Kazin
,
Timothy Shenk
via
Dissent
on
April 25, 2022
The Danger of a Single Origin Story
The 1619 Project and contested foundings.
by
Emily Sclafani
via
Perspectives on History
on
February 9, 2022
The Incoherence of American History
We ascribe too much meaning to the early years of the republic.
by
Osita Nwanevu
via
The New Republic
on
August 11, 2021
History As End
1619, 1776, and the politics of the past.
by
Matthew Karp
via
Harper’s
on
June 8, 2021
The Day Nuclear War Almost Broke Out
In the nearly sixty years since the Cuban missile crisis, the story of near-catastrophe has only grown more complicated.
by
Elizabeth Kolbert
via
The New Yorker
on
October 5, 2020
On the Uses of History for Staying Alive
Reflections on reading Nietzsche in Alaska in the early days of Covid-19.
by
Bathsheba Demuth
via
The Point
on
July 12, 2020
Pre-Existing Conditions: Pandemics as History
In times that feel “unprecedented,” it is all the more important to use history as a way to understand the present and chart a path to the future.
by
Andy Horowitz
via
Items
on
July 9, 2020
How Is a Disaster Made?
Studying Hurricane Katrina as a discrete event is studying a fiction.
by
Andy Horowitz
via
Lapham’s Quarterly
on
July 7, 2020
History Won’t Save Us
Why the battle for history must be won in the here and now.
by
William Hogeland
via
The New Republic
on
March 25, 2020
Story-Shaped Things
Historians tell stories about the past. A new book argues that those stories are often dangerously wrong.
by
Jonathan W. Wilson
via
Contingent
on
October 16, 2019
The Imperfect, Unfinished Work of Women’s Suffrage
A century after the 19th Amendment, it’s worth remembering why suffragists fought so hard, and who was fighting against them.
by
Casey N. Cep
via
The New Yorker
on
July 1, 2019
The Bitter Origins of the Fight Over Big Government
What the battle between Herbert Hoover and FDR can teach us.
by
Kim Phillips-Fein
via
The Atlantic
on
January 31, 2019
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