The past is never dead. It's not even past
In this accessible and remarkably balanced synthesis, Melvyn Leffler, one of the most distinguished and prominent historians of American foreign relations, offers a refreshing interpretation of Cold War policymaking from the vantage points of both Washington and Moscow.
On September 26, 1983, satellites notified a Soviet watch station south of Moscow of inbound U.S. missiles. Stanislav Petrov, the officer on duty, had ten minutes to determine whether to launch a counterattack.
In this new book, covering the entire period of the Cold War in Latin America, Hal Brands restores agency and initiative to Latin American actors, in the process demolishing many of the platitudes that have governed much of the U.S.foreign policy literature.image Based on prodigious research in a dizzying array of U.S., Latin American, and even East German archives, Brands’s work advances a trenchant interpretation that cannot be ignored.
As the nation celebrated the 2025 Fourth of July, flash flooding swallowed the Texas Hill Country. An entire summer’s worth of rain fell in the area, causing the Guadalupe River to rise dramatically in mere minutes. This disastrous deluge tragically claimed the lives of over 100 people. President Donald Trump declared the flood a major […]
Fredric Jameson has a new book—his last. Published posthumously in 2024, only a few months after his passing, it offers an idiosyncratic philosophical journey through his own deeply personal engagement with French theory. Just as he has done since 1985 as a Professor at Duke University, in this work Jameson takes the time to reflect […]
Jeremi and Zachary have a conversation with Dr. Mark Pomar on the historical impact of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty’s critical role of radio communications during the Cold War, and the challenges they face today including the recent threats to their operation. Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Radio Liberty”. […]
Ericka Verba’s book Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra is the riveting culmination of a lifetime of dedicated and passionate research about the world-renowned Chilean artist Violeta Parra. Verba immerses readers into the rowdy Chilean peñas, elite Communist gatherings, smoke-filled Parisian nightclubs, and desolate circus tents to narrate decades of Chilean musical history […]
Dr. Jonathan Brown, emeritus professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, followed an unconventional path to academia. Following a master’s degree in history at the University of Arizona, he received a commission in the Army R.O.T.C. program. Brown served as a lieutenant in the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1970. Later […]
The following narrative is adapted from my recent dissertation on revolutions in Latin America. When I shared it with upper division history students for a class discussion, the story surprised them. Most of them had only ever experienced student government as something to put on your resumé for grad school applications. They had never imagined […]
The therapeutic potentials of substances commonly known as “psychedelics”—drugs like psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and mescaline—have received increasingly favorable coverage in newspapers and TV programs around the world in recent years. Although it was by a relatively small margin, the state of Colorado decriminalized several psychedelic molecules as “natural medicines” through a 2022 ballot […]