Ideas

History

Bridging the Gap

Nick Witham’s Popularizing the Past portrays five American historians who published popular books that sacrificed neither intellectual depth nor political bite.

June 26, 2025 issue

Kenneth Pomeranz

The Puzzle of the Qing

Why did China’s Qing rulers keep land taxes at levels too low to meet the state’s needs for so long?

June 26, 2025 issue

Kathryn Hughes

Feminists in Wimples

A new book about the lives of four medieval women offers an engaging if flawed perspective on the past.

June 26, 2025 issue

Linda Greenhouse

How Brown Came North and Failed

The effort to desegregate Detroit’s public schools required not just the courts but a social movement that could speak effectively about the barriers that Black people faced before it could begin to seek redress.

May 29, 2025 issue

Vivian Gornick

The 176-Year Argument

At the University of Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College of New York all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?

April 24, 2025 issue

Colin Thubron

The Haven of Wilderness

In a quartet of books about life in the mountains of southern Bulgaria and North Macedonia as they descend into Greece, Kapka Kassabova gives voice to the shepherds, nomads, horse breeders, dog breeders, villagers, and refugees who live there.

June 12, 2025 issue

Nina Siegal

The Spy in the Jeu de Paume

The detailed information gathered by the French curator Rose Valland about the Nazis’ looting of artworks made it possible for the Allies to recover tens of thousands of them after World War II.

May 29, 2025 issue

Francisco Cantú

Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration

The Afterlife Is Letting Go, Brandon Shimoda’s book about how survivors and descendants of the United States’ Japanese internment camps try to keep their families’ histories alive, is also a look at the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

April 24, 2025 issue

June 4, 1989

Jonathan Mirsky

The Truth About Tiananmen

“The man who tells the truth about what really happened in Beijing will rule China.”

February 8, 2001 issue

Fang Lizhi, translated by Perry Link

The Chinese Amnesia

Under the Chinese Communist policy of “Forgetting History,” about once each decade the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society.

September 27, 1990 issue

Francine Prose

Casting a Lifeline

In Ma Jian’s lyrical, unexpectedly humorous novel ‘Beijing Coma,’ the narrator gradually realizes he is in a coma, having been shot in the head during the 1989 demonstration-massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

June 26, 2008 issue

Roderick MacFarquhar

The End of the Chinese Revolution

What Deng Xiaoping failed to comprehend is that Tiananmen Square 1989 was virtually the mirror opposite of the Cultural Revolution.

July 20, 1989 issue

Liao Yiwu

The Tanks and the People

Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me: “Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.” My father knew what he was talking about.

June 3, 2014

Orville Schell

China’s Spring

In Tiananmen Square, China had spawned one of the largest and best organized nonviolent political protest movements the world had ever seen.

June 29, 1989 issue

Pu Zhiqiang

‘June Fourth’ Seventeen Years Later: How I Kept a Promise

Every year on the evening of June 3, I have come back to Tiananmen to linger for a while. My wife, our son, and I join a few good friends to gather at the base of the Martyrs’ Monument and spend some time in reflection.

August 10, 2006 issue

Perry Link

The Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolt

For foreigners who live in Beijing, it was already clear, listening to intellectuals, students, and ordinary citizens, that yet another modern Chinese crisis was looming. But no one anticipated the force and volume of what happened.

June 29, 1989 issue

The Latest

David A. Bell

My Freedom, My Choice

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.

June 26, 2025 issue

Michael Greenberg

The Vanishing Mr. Beame

With absorbing footage of gutted apartment buildings and ravaged storefronts, Drop Dead City anatomizes the drama of New York’s descent into near bankruptcy.

June 26, 2025 issue

Robert G. Kaiser

Unraveling a Repressive Regime

Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause recognizes the achievements of the Soviet dissidents who for decades found the strength to resist stultifying Communist rule.

June 12, 2025 issue

Alice Kaplan

Zionism Without Zion

Rachel Cockerell’s family saga shows that in the search for a Jewish homeland, Palestine was only one possible location.

May 29, 2025 issue

Adam Hochschild

One Brief Shining Moment

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

May 29, 2025 issue

Sarah Haque

In Search of Almas Ali

My grandfather was an early activist in the struggle for a free Bangladesh. Why was he killed by the independence movement he helped found?

May 4, 2025

Edna Bonhomme

‘Illness and Its Very Concept’

Surveying a century of political struggles over medicine and psychiatry, a recent book foregrounds a West German collective that sought to create a radical, patient-led form of health care.

May 2, 2025

Ingrid D. Rowland

Vitruvius & the Warlords

Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was not only a manual of the building arts but a treatise on how to extend and consolidate the Roman Empire, and lent itself all too well to the autocratic ambitions of Renaissance princes.

May 15, 2025 issue

Heather O’Donnell

Ambition, Discipline, Nerve

The qualities that enabled Belle da Costa Greene to cross the color line were the same ones that made her a formidable negotiator and collector for J. P. Morgan’s library, which she led for over twenty years.

May 15, 2025 issue

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Justice for Chagos?

Decades after the Indian Ocean island colony’s inhabitants were forcibly deported to accommodate an American military base, the ICJ has ruled that they be allowed to return. But is international law sufficient to bring them justice?

May 15, 2025 issue