Notes From the Field: Bulgaria’s Tolstoyan Vegetarians

It seemed like a bad idea then, but I did it anyway. Maybe, just maybe, there was hope that the little museum in the Bulgarian mountain village of Yasna Polyana would be open. Established in 1998, the museum contained the intellectual remnants of the Bulgarian Tolstoyan community, who had created an agricultural commune in the […]
Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears (2015)

by John Carranza Clare Sears, associate professor of sociology at San Francisco State University, explores cross dressing and its place in the formation of San Francisco as an urban center in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Sears uses codebooks, arrest records, and court reports to reconstruct the history of cross dressing in an urban setting. […]
Historians on Marriage and Sexuality in the United States

by Alexander Taft In June 2015, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court of the United States resolved decades of debate by declaring marriage a fundamental right regardless of sexual orientation. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision changed the landscape of American marriage law, but what was this landscape in the first place? […]
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (2018)

by Augusta Dell’omo Donald Trump responded to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House in a predictable way. The President launched an incoherent, childish tweetstorm, labeling Wolff “mentally deranged” and an agent of the “Fake News Media,” which, typically, drew even more attention to the book. Indeed, in the hours after the […]
Cuba’s Revolutionary World
Demystifying “Cool:” A Brief History

by Kate Grover When I was nineteen, I was bestowed with some of the highest praise a person can receive. It happened at a rehearsal for The Vagina Monologues (go figure…) when some cast members I hadn’t met approached me for the first time: “You’re Kate, right? Cool Kid Kate?” “What?” “Cool Kid Kate. There’s […]
Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific

By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45. by Jonathan R. Hunt University of Southhampton First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017). Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly […]
“Doing” History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles
Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed

by Mark Atwood Lawrence Originally published as “Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed” in the Fall 2017 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Editors Note: The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War premiered on PBS last Sunday, September 17. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor […]