fb-pixel Skip to main content

HISTORY

H.D.S. Greenway
Security personnel stands guard as Independent Election Commission workers unload ballot boxes from a truck to be taken to a counting center the day after Afghanistan held presidential elections, in September, 2019.
Afghanistan and Vietnam: How did the US lose two wars?
In the end, our clients could never shake the impression that they were puppets fighting for foreigners.

RENÉE GRAHAM
Josie and Lydia Jackson, Alaina Roberts's great-great-grandmother and great-great-great grandmother.
An overdue reckoning for Black Freedmen on native lands
A new book from a descendant of African Americans enslaved by Indians examines both family and American history.

IDEAS | Alice L. Baumgartner
A ceiling mural by José Clemente Orozco in Guadalajara's Palacio de Gobierno depicts the signing of laws that abolished slavery in Mexico in 1837.
Mexico’s surprising role in sparking the US Civil War
Our southern neighbor was chaotic and weak, but its abolition of slavery gave it a powerful moral authority.

Renée Graham
Rush Limbaugh spoke before then-President Trump took the stage during the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida on Dec. 21, 2019.
Rush Limbaugh wasn’t funny or entertaining. He was racist.
When ESPN hired the radio talk show host, it legitimized his bigotry and offered a blueprint that his greatest acolyte followed into the White House.

IDEAS | STEPHEN KINZER
US soldiers in Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2011. About 2,500 service members remain in the country today.
Trump was right: Get out of Afghanistan
President Biden should honor what looks like the best deal we’re ever going to get in that country.

JEFF JACOBY
An undated drawing shows Rutherford B. Hayes taking the presidential oath of office in 1877.
The racial decency — and irony — of Rutherford Hayes
He was a steadfast champion of Black voting rights, yet he presided over the end of Reconstruction.

IDEAS | KELLY HORAN
Shot to the heart: A love letter can light a fire in a pandemic winter
A historian of love and its discontents on the lost art of the well-crafted billet-doux.

Renée Graham
Whitney Houston at the Super Bowl in 1991.
When Whitney Houston soared, and lifted an anxious nation at war
With a national anthem for the ages 30 years ago, a Black woman gave America what it didn’t even realize it needed.

ALAN WIRZBICKI
At the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, artists got the green light to use the characters created by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby.”
After 95 years, writers finally get the green light to lift from ‘The Great Gatsby’
Laws that prevent artists from borrowing from classic works, even decades after the original author’s death, chill the broader culture.

JEFF JACOBY
Pictures of Holocaust victims line the Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
The politics of an Auschwitz survivor’s son
I am a libertarian-leaning conservative because the horrors of the Holocaust were engineered by government.