Iryna Vushko— I was putting the finishing touch on my book on the history of places and people from a hundred years ago and was watching an apocalypse of unprecedented proportions in real life, the scenes of massive exodus from Ukraine streamed live on TV in spring and summer of 2022. I watched it all from the safety of my home in the U.S., while most of my family was on the other side of that story—in Ukraine.  We have seen some of it before, a historian in me was thinking. And yet, we have not, at least not since 1945: the mass death of civilians and the mass relocation of survivors hea ..read more

Bruce Ackerman— For the first time in history, all of us are living two lives at once — engaging  in distant relationships on the internet while dealing with one another in face-to-face fashion in the real world. Our double-lives are the source of a distinctively postmodern predicament. Its source is a fundamental feature of the human condition:  We all need at least five or six hours of sleep, leaving us eighteen or nineteen hours a day to confront the competing demands of friends and families, schoolmates and workmates and co-religionists and many other associates. Yet it is u ..read more

Robert Gildea— [T]here was something of a gender revolution. Miners’ wives had been transformed by the strike. They had been involved in setting up local support groups, which came together in Women Against Pit Closures. They learned to organise soup kitchens and the distribution of food parcels to striking families on a large scale. They stood on picket lines when their men had been arrested or were in danger of arrest. They became involved in fundraising, travelling to make speeches in support of the strike, meeting other trade unionists and left-wing groups that were hoping to promote it. T ..read more

Marci Shore— The Sky Turns Black from Smoke Close to midnight on Tuesday, 18 February 2014, twenty-one-year-old Misha Martynenko, reeking of smoke, returned to the Kiev apartment he shared with his mother, his grandmother, and his ten-year-old sister. He was wearing a white beaded cross around his neck. In his mother’s face Misha saw that she had aged several years since they had parted that morning. He looked in the mirror: his own face was the color of pallid charcoal. His eyes were bulging. He began to cry. Nearly ten hours later Misha awoke still wearing clothing covered with soot and dirt ..read more

Rachel Shteir— Writing about Betty Friedan and her famous book that expanded women’s lives, The Feminine Mystique, I often admired the zeal with which she tried to expand her own. She was DIY project, pioneer, escape artist. One well-known shape this self-improvement, for lack of a better word, took was her great book, published in 1963. Another was her activism, founding many organizations for women’s justice. But there was a third branch of activity, driven by the rush to live in a way that was different from her mother. Her desire to get out, which began before she could even articulate it ..read more

N. W. Collins— “Every American has seen the shocking images from Somalia,” President George H. W. Bush commenced the live address from the Oval Office.1 Announcing the new mission to East Africa, President Bush presented the national objective: to lead a global coalition to ease the humanitarian crisis in the region, to serve as a catalyst for the community of nations to act. “I have given the order . . . to move a substantial American force into Somalia . . . As I speak a Marine amphibious ready group, which we maintain at sea, is offshore Mogadishu.” The coalition would set out to avert huma ..read more

Paul R. Ehrlich— Many of our problems seem traceable to Homo sapiens being a small-group animal, most comfortable in collections of under 150 people or so, the so-called Dunbar’s number. It was proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar based on studies of primate brain size and group size. That’s roughly the maximum size of most hunter-gatherer groups, as it is today of typical groups of colleagues, lengths of Christmas card lists, and so on.18 We’re now a species trying to get “comfortable” in groups of thousands, millions, or in some peoples’ minds, billions. And we’re clearly often doing a lo ..read more

In 1980, the National Women’s History Project successfully gained national recognition for Women’s History Week, issued by President Jimmy Carter. Women’s History Month, later established by Congress in 1987, commemorates the central role of women in American history and contemporary culture.1 From biographies of women activists to histories of feminist art movements, our Women’s History Month reading list contains ten compelling works to read this month and beyond. Merze Tate The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar Barbara D. Savage A powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate, a tr ..read more

Jordan Abel— “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”1 Tuck & Yang One of the most difficult things I’ve had to do in my life is talk about where I come from. As an urban Nisga’a person who grew up disconnected from my home community, questions like “Where are you from?” or “What community do you belong to?” felt like they needed hours to answer instead of moments. In fact, I wrote an entire book that attempts to answer these questions, and I still don’t think I’ve gotten to the bottom of it. Recently, I’ve started answering this question by saying that I am a queer Nisga’a person from Vancouve ..read more

Robert D. Kaplan— Tiresias, the old, blind seer, the prophet who knows better than anyone else the will of the gods, is a recurring character in Greek mythology. “Mine is the strength of truth,” within which lies safety, he tells Oedipus, when an angry Oedipus, still king of Thebes, begins to face the horrible truth about who he really is.1 Tiresias specializes in telling his listeners what they least want to hear—the very thoughts they repress. He is no god but almost serves the function of one. Just as you can’t deceive the gods, you cannot deceive Tiresias. He is a replacement for one’s con ..read more