Shirley Hazzard, Poet of Aftermath
Perhaps the pivotal figure of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories, a recently published posthumous volume, is one Clelia Kingslake. A Canadian, she lands in Rhodes, Greece,…
Category: HISTORY
Immigration: What We’ve Done, What We Must Do
The boats were stiflingly hot in the day and freezing cold at night. Much of the upper deck was exposed to the elements, leaving passengers…
The Arch of Injustice | Public Books
Asked to identify the city that best captures the long arc and ongoing dynamics of American history, most people would select New York or Philadelphia…
How Versailles Still Haunts the World
The Treaty of Versailles—a contract that changed the course of the century and beyond—has been all but forgotten in the public sphere and in popular…
“Somewhere in This Brain”: Memories of Segregation, Soul Music & “Macbeth” with Al Bell
Al Bell is a legend of the Memphis music scene. As a songwriter, record producer, and former chairman and owner of Stax Records—the famous soul-music…
Identity, Islands, and Hazel V. Carby
What histories do we inherit? In the current crisis of Brexit—which points to larger global shifts toward nationalism and xenophobia—there is no more urgent a…
Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War
When Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from France in 1804, he proclaimed: “Eternal hatred to France, that is our cry.” Dessalines anticipated that Haitian independence…
Buster Keaton Falls Up | Public Books
Comedy inverts norms and breaks barriers. But in order to reveal, as Northrop Frye suggested it must, “absurd or irrational [patriarchal] law,” comedy requires a…
A Communism of Feelings | Public Books
Communism was always meant to be joyful, at least to many in the Old Left. Emma Goldman famously envisioned a revolution with slamming dance parties.…
Public Thinker: B. R. Cohen on How Food Became “Pure”
Bright pink margarine. “Olive oil” made from cottonseed in Tennessee. A cross-country police chase to arrest a sugar scammer’s widow. In Pure Adulteration, Benjamin Cohen…