Historiography

How to Think about Robert Caro

The official website of Robert A. Caro isn’t shy about quoting the Sunday Times (UK), which calls him “the greatest political biographer of the modern era.” Even as readers await the fifth volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the claim cries out for perspective and comparison.Admittedly no such incontestable primacy is possible for any biographer. The criteria are too debatable and the unlikelihood of a single biographer atop Olympus too obvious. Yet the case for Caro looks strong. Read more

L. Benjamin Rolsky

February 13, 2024

Why the Study of the Right is Broken, Part II

For most of its collective existence, the study of the right in the US has suffered from an anxious, constricted set of categories and epistemological assumptions about who exactly the Read more

L. Benjamin Rolsky

February 6, 2024

Why the Study of the Right is Broken, Part I

In the summer of 1981, the New Left Review published a special issue titled, “The Anatomy of Reaganism.” Featuring the writings of prominent sociologists and political theorists including Alan Wolfe Read more

Anthony Chaney

November 7, 2023

Richardson and Woodard: It tracks

In Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, Democracy Awakening, US history turns on conflicting interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and its claim that “all men are created equal.” One interpretation Read more

Adolph Reed, Jr.

April 10, 2023

The South: The Past, Historicity, and Black American History (Part II)

Interventions like the 1619 Project and Thirteentherism are darker expressions of the practice of attending to the past for allegorical purposes. They are extreme extensions of a disposition to abjure Read more

Priscila Dorella

August 14, 2021

Book Review of The Polymath

British historian Peter Burke has written many books and essays exploring the history of knowledge. This new prosopographical study examines the careers of 500 polymaths over the last 500 years. Read more

L.D. Burnett

August 7, 2021

Arguing the Unthinkable

In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot introduces what he calls “the unthinkable”—a world-historical occurrence that is not recognized or acknowledged as such because those witnessing it do not have (or Read more