Forty-one years ago, a recent Yale graduate named Jacob Weisberg wrote a profile of the Republican operative and influence peddler Roger Stone for The New Republic, under the headline “The State-of-th...

Or, here there be monsters

The tumultuous events of the past year and a half have made it all too easy to imagine that American academia is not going through fundamental structural changes, but only an exceptional, irrational, ...

For several decades now, it has been fashionable to mourn the “death of truth.” At first, the tragic demise was largely a matter for academic discussion, especially among critics of post-structuralist...

“Old Paris is no more.

Just another day in America, 2026.

“The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.” Every New Leftist in the late 1960s was familiar with that axiom, attributed to Fidel Castro, and most took it to heart.

Last Monday, the faculty of Princeton University, where I teach, voted to reinstitute the proctoring of exams after more than 130 years of reliance on an honor code to prevent cheating.

TRIBUNE. Dans une tribune au « Monde », l’historien américain David Bell commente l’affaire Grasset et l’interventionnisme « préoccupant » du milliardaire français. Il juge toutefois « la situation am...

When M.

UK conservatism is changing dramatically, as I discovered when I hung out with some of the right’s youngest, drunkest up-and-comers.

Newspaper columnists instructed generations of citizens about the Fourteenth Amendment. Today, the country seems to have forgotten how clear the law is.

A scrimmage in a Border Station

In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. As early as 1757, a contributor to Britain’s Literary Magazine complained that “critic is no longer an appellation of dignity,” becaus...

In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

Combining history, detective story, and memoir, a surprising and revealing account of the antisemitic myth of “the Wandering Jew”

In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

In this season of ruin, I think from time to time of Shelley’s brilliantly savage sonnet “England in 1819” (see below), written in white-hot anger against his country’s corrupt elite in the aftermath ...

YouTube video by Austerity Singers

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

One of the best parts of my job is that every few years I accompany a group of Princeton students to Normandy to see the sites where the American military landed in June of 1944, and then to follow th...

Liberals can’t catch a break.

Appel à communications    Du 1er au 4 octobre 2026 Colloque international Lieux : Musée de la Révolution française (Vizille) Archives départementales de l’Isère (Saint-Martin-d’Hères)   Comité d’organ...

For many years now, conservative and centrist critics have claimed that elite American universities suffer from a lack of “viewpoint diversity.” Even as these institutions made recruiting women and un...

Some 233 years ago, French interference in American internal affairs led to a strengthening of the party in power in the USA.

In 2004, The New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed advisor to President George W.

Many years ago, I asked a friend what label he thought future historians would give to the period we were living through.

“Revolution continues Christianity, and it contradicts it. It is, at the same time, its heir and its adversary.” – Jules Michelet (1848)In the years leading up to the bicentenary commemorations of 198...

The American Historical Association is being torn apart over members’ views on Israel.