Keisha Blain’s Set the World on Fire is an amazing achievement, and not just in the histories she has revealed but in the ways in which her book asks us to think critically about what it is to do intellectual history. In her interview with me, Blain discussed the criticism she often faced: that her subjects were “activists” not intellectuals. More and more I’ve realized that this is something commonly thrown at historians and others writing about intellectuals in non-institutionalized places-people working in activists organizations, in schools, in prisons, and really anywhere that is not traditional academic space. The claim Read more