Fall 2024

It’s tempting to view 1968 in the United States and Western Europe as a repetition of 1848—and, contrary to Marx’s axiom, one fully as tragic the second time around. In both years, radical movements mainly of the young made daring, …

Susan Jacoby writes under a misconception. I did not advocate that all American progressives should justify their politics by referring to the Sermon on the Mount or other biblical passages that imply that God is just. Rather, my point was …

Most political biographers choose a subject whom they either admire or loathe. They then spend years attempting to understand what, for example, made Martin Luther King, Jr., an inspiring leader of the black freedom struggle or drove Stalin to order …

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays by Christopher Hitchens Nation Books, 2004, 475 pp., $16.95 Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, an unsettling matter has roiled certain precincts of the left: Christopher Hitchens’s zealous support of the Bush …

This is a defining moment for the American left. As Michael Wreszin, a distinguished historian, is well aware, reform and radical movements always get transformed in the crucible of war. The Civil War turned abolitionists into militant Republicans, World War …

I love my country. I love its passionate and endlessly inventive culture, its remarkably diverse landscape, its agonizing and wonderful history. I particularly cherish its civic ideals-social equality, individual liberty, a populist democracy-and the unending struggle to put their laudable, …

It’s never a good idea to refight the last big war. But perhaps one can learn a lesson from it. The atmosphere of American politics since September 11 bears an uncomfortable resemblance to that of the cold war, particularly during …

Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel ed. Richard H. Minear, introduction by Art Spiegelman The New Press, 1999, 272 pp., $25 Somehow, all the hypsters who compiled end-of-century, best-of-the-millennium lists neglected …

In 1980, I began to keep a file of letters from my father. I don’t remember exactly why I decided to preserve the letters, to treat them as historical documents and not just as his re¬sponses of and for the …

The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century by Michael Denning Verso, 1996 556 pp $25, cloth; $20, paper In 1950, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) published Yertle the Turtle. A brief summary of this illustrated story …

I thought it was only the corporate breed who cut to “the bottom line.” At any rate, Joel Rogers protests too much. The purpose of my comments on the New Party was not to bury what is clearly the wisest …

Seventy years ago, American elites knew how to enforce the two-party system. “In 1924,” Robert and Helen Lynd reported in their classic study, Middletown, “It was considered such ‘bad business’ to vote for the third party [the Progressives, who ran …