Ashraf H. A. Rushdy— Many politicians before Donald Trump have abused decorum, shown bad taste, and wholly misunderstood history when they used the metaphor of lynching to describe whatever political travail they faced. What makes his use of lynching as a metaphor truly original is the fact that it is
Michael Hunter— Sir Walter Scott was second to none in his use of supernatural stories and allusions in a fictional setting. In Rob Roy, for instance, he speaks of fairies as “a race of airy beings, who formed an intermediate class between men and dæmons, and who, if not positively malignant
Timothy William Waters— Why Remembering the Civil War Matters: Talking about Belonging in America How we remember the Civil War matters for thinking about our increasingly fragile union today—how we talk about identity, belonging, and leaving. The war seems to offer an obvious moral model. But that solution dissolves when
By Abbas Amanat — The Persians, and before them the Medes, were among the first people known to the ancient Greeks outside their own geographic sphere. As early as the sixth century BCE, when Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550 BCE–330 BCE), conquered Asia Minor,
Timothy William Waters— What We (Mis-)Remember about Our Reasons for Fighting America is now so polarized that serious people wonder if the country will hold together. The Atlantic devoted its December issue to “How to Stop a Civil War”—and the Atlantic, founded in 1857, covered the actual Civil War. As
Thomas N. Mitchell— Democracy is at a particularly critical and fascinating point in its history. The collapse of communism in 1989 brought a wave of euphoria among proponents of democracy, and extravagant references to the end of history and of mankind’s journey towards a universally acceptable political order. To many,
António Lobo Antunes— My mother was their first cousin, meaning the first cousin of the father, not of the black son who was never his son though he treated him as a son and the black treated him as his father, the cousin of my mother brought him back from
Iain McGilchrist— It might seem reductive to link the highest achievements of the human mind, in philosophy and the arts, to the structure of the brain. I believe it is not. For one thing, even if it were possible for mind to be ‘reduced’, as we say, to matter, this
John Hardman— The diary entry of the new king is succinct: 10 [May 1774]: Death of the King at two in the afternoon and departure for Choisy. This château was 9 kilometres to the south of Paris. Infection hung about Versailles and the royal family lost no time getting out.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers— In 1859, after touring the antebellum South, the journalist and New York Tribune editor James Redpath attempted to explain for his readers why white southern women opposed emancipation. He believed that their sentiments were tied to a lifetime of indoctrination, “reared,” as they were, “under the shadow of the