From the Editors Archives - Page 15 of 170

Democracy

The Foiled Confederate Coup of 1861

An interview with historian Ted Widmer about his new book, “Lincoln on the Verge”

October 8, 2020 • by Claire Potter and Ted Widmer

_____ As Americans anxiously count down the days to November 3, 2020, President Donald Trump has been evasive about whether, should he lose, he would accept the results of the election. Commentators have rightly deplored this, arguing that the peaceful transfer of power has always been a cornerstone of American democracy. But ...

Columnists

Joe Biden’s Campaign Moving to Solid Ground as the Trump Team Distracts

Let’s take a closer look at what the Republicans are distracting us from, shall we?

September 22, 2020 • by Heather Cox Richardson

The idea of defunding cities is vague and it is also odd, considering how many Americans actually live in cities. The U.S. Conference of Mayors wrote to Trump on September 7 to ask him to rescind his memorandum, noting that “attacks on America’s cities are attacks on America itself. America’s ...

Joe Biden’s Campaign Moving to Solid Ground as the Trump Team Distracts

Interviews

Capitalism Hits Home: An Interview with Harriet Fraad

July 23, 2020 • by Harriet Fraad and Daniel Gaztambide

Dr. Fraad is a founding member of the Women's Liberation Movement in New Haven, Connecticut and she’s been a political activist since her high school days. She joined Daniel Gaztambide for a brief interview on November 11, 2019, on how capitalism “trickles down” into the intimacies of our relationships and ...

From the Editors

The Worst of Times, the Best of Times

If everything feels weirdly out of joint, it’s because it is

July 16, 2020 • by James Miller

_______________________ In these dog days of summer, in the midst of the world’s worst pandemic in a century, as many of us welcome the largest protest movement in American history, while others fear for their jobs in what already is a devastating economic downturn, everything feels weirdly out of joint. On July ...

Announcements

Public Seminar Presents | Lincoln on the Verge, with Historian Ted Widmer

A Public Seminar book talk

July 15, 2020 • by Claire Potter

On the eve of his 52nd birthday, February 11, 1861, the President-elect of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, walked onto a train, the first step of his journey to the White House, and his rendezvous with destiny. But as the train began to carry Lincoln toward Washington, it was far from ...

Public Seminar Presents | Lincoln on the Verge, with Historian Ted Widmer

Climate & Ecology

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta

A webinar view, featuring author Debjani Bhattacharyya and commenter Kasia Paprocki

July 15, 2020 • by Claire Potter

The event was hosted and moderated by Claire Potter, co-executive editor at Public Seminar & professor of history at The New School for Social Research. Save the date: our next Public Seminar book talk is on Wednesday, July 22, featuring Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to ...

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta

Interviews

“A Worldwide Mutual Pact”

An interview with Wendy Brown

July 7, 2020 • by Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka

There are limits to the utility of theory in a crisis. So far, COVID-19 has not exactly occasioned a mass embrace of the mountains of leftist ideas—both theoretical and practical—that have been prepared for such a moment; instead, we’ve witnessed a hardening of the preexisting order, in which the old ...

From the Editors

American Dream

We celebrate Independence Day with quiet determination this year as we continue the fight for everyone’s freedom

July 3, 2020 • by Claire Potter

On July 3, 1776, the 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress, many of them slaveholders, took a step over the void in the Philadelphia State House. Exactly one year earlier, George Washington, a veteran of the King’s service and now a General commissioned by rebels had taken charge of ...

From the Editors

How to Topple a Monument

And other thoughts about history

June 26, 2020 • by Claire Potter

On May 31, 2020, Sarah Parcak, an archeologist at the University of Alabama-Birmingham took the popular temperature and, like any good historian, recognized the need for a little public engagement. “PSA For ANYONE who might be interested in how to pull down an obelisk* safely,” Parcak tweeted, “from an Egyptologist ...

Interviews

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

June 24, 2020 • by Charlotte Slivka and Ted Hamm

Charlotte Slivka [CS]: Bernie’s Brooklyn is so much more than what the title would suggest. This book shows a deep love for the city and how politics and life are so tightly intertwined in our dense and crazy city. Are you from New York? Ted Hamm [TH]: No, I grew up ...

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

Interviews

“Many Gay Men of My Generation Weren’t Planning to Die of Old Age”

Lambda Literary Award–winning poet Mark Bibbins on his new collection, 13th Balloon

June 20, 2020 • by Mark Bibbins and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1989. “Real diseases are useful material.” In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag argued that the virus had been stigmatized as a plague, “a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable ‘others’ and as (potentially) ...

“Many Gay Men of My Generation Weren’t Planning to Die of Old Age”

From the Editors

What Is John Roberts Up To?

Voting with liberals in two important civil rights cases, the Chief Justice seems to be invoking a version of the Garland rule: award no policy victories in the last year of a presidential term

June 19, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Three days ago, the first pre-election blow to Trumpism arrived. In a 6-3 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch (a Donald Trump appointee) voting with the majority, the Court ruled that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights act does make discrimination in the employment ...