Recently Published

Here's What Is So Hopeful About September's People's Climate March

by Christopher Sellers

This is not your father's environmental movement.

Why Naming John Marshall Chief Justice Was John Adams’s “Greatest Gift” to the Nation

by Harlow Giles Unger

“I had never before heard myself named for the office and had not even thought of it. I was pleased as well as surprised and bowed in silence. Next day I was nominated.”

This Is American Democracy Today. It Isn’t Pretty.

by Lawrence Davidson

It still has its virtues relative to more authoritarian forms of rule. However, these too may be shrinking.

“My Words are my Weapons” A Conversation with Sharan Kumar Limbale, India’s Champion of the Downtrodden

by Nibir K. Ghosh & Sunita Rani

“My mother is an untouchable, while my father is a high caste from one of the privileged classes of India.”

Congress May Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline, but History Shows How the Debate Has Shifted Against Energy Producers

by Matthew K. Kahn

That sound you hear is the dying gasp of a partisan position that is growing more and more untenable from both a political and scientific perspective.

Why Did Solidarity Succeed in Poland? They Took the Lead. We Didn't.

by Gregory F. Domber

Reagan may have demanded that Gorbachev “tear down this wall” but in practice he took a humble approach.

The Vicious Politico-religious Sunni-Shi’ite Civil War that the U.S. Government has Ignited in Iraq and in Syria

by Rodrigue Tremblay

As it should have been expected by anybody who has any knowledge of history in that part of the world, Iraq was far from being a stable “democracy."

What the Opponents of the New AP Standards Don't Get

by H. Michael Hartoonian, Richard D. Van Scotter, and William E. White

Recent events in Jefferson County, Denver, Colorado, underscore a misunderstanding Americans generally hold regarding the U.S. history curriculum.

This Is How Our Recent Wars Looked to Acclaimed Photojournalist Peter van Agtmael (Interview)

by Robin Lindley

There's the mainstream media version of the world.  And then there's reality. 

This Is What It's Like to Be a Refugee

by Sigrid MacRae

Bald statistics and the appalling numbers do not begin to tell the dismal story.

Why Americans Have Been Duped over the Use of the Atomic Bomb

by Paul Ham

One day somebody in high office in Washington will have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge, if not apologise for, a grotesque distortion of the truth that the Truman Administration visited on the American people in the pages of Harper’s Magazine in 1947.

They Lost Their Empire in World War I, but Reigned for 600 Years: What We Can Learn from the Habsburgs

by Paula Sutter Fichtner

6 leadership lessons the Habsburgs can teach us.

Why Did the British Try to Burn Down the White House?

by Peter Snow

Don't ask British people ... most don't know this ever happened. 

Edward Snowden is the 21st Century's Frank Church

by Kristie Macrakis

After decades of growth, it's time to shrink the national security state.

He Was Scottish and He Changed the World. And Hardly Anyone Knows His Name.

by Julian Havil

John Napier was a man of his time, but perhaps not of ours.

The Question We Need to Remember to Ask Ourselves If We Want to Keep Our Freedoms

by Christopher L. Webber

What if the experiment in liberty should perish from the earth or be limited to America and other western democracies?

Why Walter Lippmann Is Still Talked About

by Craufurd D. Goodwin

His career should be a model for journalists of the future.

Looking to Science for Answers About Race

by Michael Yudell

Race of course matters, and so too does the meaning we give it. We have often turned to science for that meaning—to justify beliefs and to provide a vocabulary for explaining human differences. But science too struggles with understanding race.

This Is the History Behind the Awful Idea that Mankind Is Divided into Races

by Robert Wald Sussman

The new “scientific racism” of the twenty-first century is just the old ideology of 500 years of prejudice dressed up to look new.

The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel

by Paul Berman

Boycotts are not supposed to go on forever. They are supposed to be practical. Either they work, or fail to work.