“Out of Sight, Out of Mind”
August 7, 2023
Sean M. Kelley— You’ve probably never heard of William Vernon, a lifelong resident of Newport, Rhode Island, but he was one of the biggest slave owners in American history. According… READ MORE
Category: European History
The Lake District and Atlantic Slavery
July 24, 2023
Nicholas Radburn— If you think about locations transformed by the transatlantic slave trade, you’ll likely recall American plantations or former slaving forts on the coast of West Africa. You are… READ MORE
The Wagner Group Explained
July 7, 2023
John Mauceri— Among the many confusions about the private Russian army known as the Wagner Group is how to pronounce its name. Reporters and pundits seem to vacillate between “Wag-ner”… READ MORE
Prologue: Our Time
May 4, 2023
In a small front room, amid the unfamiliar smells of Gauloise tobacco smoke and strong black coffee, I sit with my French host family staring at a small black-and-white television… READ MORE
Aleksandr Rodchenko’s “shadow oeuvre”
February 27, 2023
Aglaya K. Glebova — What should the modern world look like? The Soviet artist Aleksandr Rodchenko, like many of his avant-garde comrades both east and west of Moscow, had strong… READ MORE
The Last Days of Mankind
February 14, 2023
Karl Kraus— EPILOGUE The Final Night Battlefield. Craters. Smoke clouds. Starless night. The horizon is a wall of flames. Corpses. Dying soldiers. Men and women in gas masks appear. A… READ MORE
Chemical Lace and Connecting St. Gallen to New York and New Jersey
November 29, 2022
A New York Times best art book of 2022! Emma Cormack — Now on view at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York, the exhibition Threads of Power: Lace from… READ MORE
“Digging Europe’s Grave:” Thomas Piketty on Franco-German Tax Policy
November 16, 2022
Thomas Piketty— To love Europe is to want to change it. The French and German governments which have been in power for the past ten years claim to be Europhiles,… READ MORE
Italy in the British Imagination
November 9, 2022
Beth Saunders— In their introduction to The Idea of Italy: Photography and the British Imagination, 1840–1890, editors Antonella Pelizzari and Scott Wilcox explain that the very idea of Italy was,… READ MORE
The Neighborhood as Social Network: Excerpt from The Little Street
August 30, 2022
The neighborhood takes center stage in Linda Stone-Ferrier‘s interdisciplinary study, The Little Street: The Neighborhood in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Culture. Engaging the work of Johannes Vermeer—from whose painting View… READ MORE
Fashion or Function?