Front Cover
Carolyn Brown, Vegetable Market at Chichicastenango, Guatemala, 1995. Copyright Carolyn Brown.
Current Affairs
Will Civilizations Clash?
In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington said that wars of the future would not be fought by nation against nation, but by cultures and religions from different civilizations, one against the other.
#MeToo Books: Entry Points for Men’s Understanding a Women’s Movement
More than any of the other books above, Speak enables a reader (female or male) to immerse in the experience of having been assaulted—and the traumatic aftermath.
An Administrative Life
Gray remarks in her preface, “I began my training for the academic profession at a time now wistfully (and somewhat mistakenly) called a golden age, and retired in what may eventually be deemed an age of bronze.”
The Conscience of an Immigrant American Conservative
If we face the prospect of a civil war prompted by immigration, you don’t finish this book imagining its imminence. There is ample reason, however, to create a new national approach to international migration to the United States.
The Past is Present
Did Robert E. Lee Commit Treason?
By the time of the Civil War, only five convictions for treason had ever emerged from the federal courts, and all of those had occurred in the administrations of Washington and John Adams.
From the Outside In: A Foreigner’s Education in American History
As I’ve grown more familiar with the colonists’ habits and beliefs, however, I’ve become increasingly skeptical of the Americanization thesis.
The Best Books on the Impact of World War I
Sheehan’s book is a piercing explanation of why Americans and Europeans today have such different views about the nature and purpose of war.
The Greatest Judge in American History?
The Supreme Court was Marshall’s vehicle for instituting the Federalist vision of government even after the Federalist Party had perished. Marshall strengthened the Supreme Court, which previously had the appearance of triviality.
The Best Books on the American Revolution
Nash’s achievement is not merely to show the “underside” or “history from the bottom up,” but to show how the ideas of the Revolution motivated men and women across the economic spectrum.
Scholarship, Truth, and Islam
What Bevilacqua describes as “the Republic of Arabic letters” was the emergence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a number of European scholars who, although Christian, championed Islam as a worthwhile subject of investigation.
Sciences and Arts
The Problem With Happiness
If we are to make our lives meaningful, we must live for values beyond happiness, values that may conflict with happiness.
Dispatches From the Emotional Rollercoaster
Two decades of concentrated empirical research into the history of emotions has armed historians with broad knowledge claims about what emotions are, how they work, and upon what they are contingent.
Geology of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex: A Primer
One reason that population and economic activity in north central Texas focused on the Metroplex is because the Trinity River is short and does not flow over the salt deposits to the west.
Nowhere at Home: Albert Einstein, the ‘Gypsy’ Who Became a Citizen of the World
Towards each and every one of these countries in which he lived or travelled, he felt an ambivalence. With the possible exception of Switzerland, Einstein felt nowhere at home throughout his life.
Folio
Three poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
translated by Frederick Turner and Zsuzsanna Ozsváth
Works of art by Allison V. Smith, Carolyn Brown, John Pomara, and Ludwig Schwarz
Download a PDF copy of the folio.Literary Lives
The Man Who Insulted Shakespeare
The old system of aristocratic literary patronage was on the wane; Greene and his friends still sought patronage by attaching fulsome dedications to their works, but with slender or no results.
The Publisher’s Reader Extraordinaire
From his earliest years Garnett deplored the insularity and what he saw as the anti-intellectualism of British authors and the British reading public—their philistinism, in fact.
A New Picture of Oscar Wilde
Frankel shows how the letter to Douglas changed over the course of its long composition from a bitter excoriation of the spoiled aristocrat as the agent of the artist’s ruin to a deeply reflective spiritual autobiography of the sort that Wilde read in prison (such as Augustine’s Confessions).
Poetry At the Threshold: Reflections on a New Hölderlin Translation
For Hölderlin, language is not an instrument of communication, a tool designed to enable us to transmit or convey “information;” it constitutes, rather, nothing less than the supreme event of human existence, a world-forming power that exposes us to the highest possibilities of our being.
Art Worlds
My Detroit, My Afghanistan
Despite enforced school segregation, my father became a diligent and helpful high school teacher at all-black Miller High, where he taught kids like jazz great Kenny Burrell.
The Incursion of Administrative Language into the Education of Artists
In effect we teach strategies of disunity in the place of the Aristotelian unities, and our students practice making disunified works as soon as they become aware of the possibility.
Painting After the Digital Revolution
Throughout Laura Owens, viewers can see what they might interpret as evidence of her female, mother-human embodiment—buttons, childrens’ cartoons, macramé, her son, cut paper, puff paint—but playfulness in Owens’s work predates her motherhood and competes with it.
Archaeology’s Heroic Age
New Yorker John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood were classic nineteenth-century adventurers, immortalized for revealing the glories of ancient Maya civilization to an astonished world.
Humanity’s Most Beautiful Problem
Color makes our lives more vivid, more beautiful. But it also hides ugly truths.
