On the Judgment of History

Joan Scott’s "On the Judgment of History" asks us to imagine the past without the idea of progress. But what gets left out in the process?

The idea of history’s judgment was, and remains, seductive. Yet this notion cannot withstand scrutiny, as Joan Wallach Scott’s On the Judgment of History shows.

After Charlottesville, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wanted to find out how societies face up to their past—and why some fail.