History Archives - Public Seminar

How Alma Reed Triumphed Over “Positively Frightened” Critics of the Orozco Room

On the woman behind the brotherhood

April 17, 2026 • by John Reed

In January 1931, journalist and art-world impresario Alma Reed attended the unveiling of A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood, a cycle of frescoes by José Clemente Orozco and the first mural commissioned for The New School's bespoke building in New York City's progressive haven of Greenwich Village. ...

How Alma Reed Triumphed Over “Positively Frightened” Critics of the Orozco Room

Middle East & North Africa

Street Tulips

The outbreak of war has exposed, and exacerbated, fault lines in the Iranian diaspora

April 13, 2026 • by M. B. Molavi

In search of a flower, I spent one day in early March going to plant shops and market stalls in central Malmö, Sweden. I was looking for something in particular: the laleh-ye vazhgoon, the inverted tulip. A reddish mountain flower that grows in the Zagros, the ancestral lands of the ...

Urban Environments

Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

An excerpt from The Tears of Other People: A history and memoir of displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

February 12, 2026 • by E. M. Ippolito

Why is it important to interpret Portsmouth's history of urban renewal as a history of class? So far, historians who have published work on the subject have chosen not to take this angle. All contemporary writing on Puddle Dock and the North End—the city's two neighborhoods destroyed by urban renewal—notes ...

Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

History

Portsmouth, Displacement, and Belonging in The Tears of Other People

A conversation with author E. M. Ippolito about the settler colonialist roots of modern displacement and urban renewal

February 12, 2026 • by E. M. Ippolito and Eva Szilardi-Tierney

E. M. Ippolito’s relationship to her hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a complicated one. While Ippolito’s exploration of Portsmouth’s working-class history began when she was a college student, it was her own displacement from Portsmouth that personalized her research. Learning the story of Portsmouth’s 1960s urban renewal—a federally funded ...

Portsmouth, Displacement, and Belonging in The Tears of Other People

Education

The Words We Learn to Fear

How authoritarianism begins with the policing of language

December 4, 2025 • by Maria B. Olujic

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz once wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” I didn’t understand that line until my own country broke apart. Now I see what he meant—when people learn to fear their own words, it is its own form of exile. Two of my uncles learned this early: ...

History

Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

In an excerpt from Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, the author surveys how left-wing intellectuals responded to 9/11

December 3, 2025 • by Jeremy Varon

The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in ...

History

From William Lloyd Garrison to Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

A brief genealogy of nonviolent resistance

November 18, 2025 • by Bennett Parten

In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr., then only 30 years old and fresh off leading the Montgomery bus boycotts, traveled to India to pay homage to one of his heroes, the late Mahatma Gandhi. Over the course of five weeks, King met with Indian heads of state, spoke with some ...

From William Lloyd Garrison to Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Economy

Goldbugs

An excerpt from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

November 17, 2025 • by Quinn Slobodian

People make bad money, and that money makes bad people.— Peter Boehringer Monetary issues have long divided neoliberals. Can you trust a central bank to manage currency? Can the growth of the money supply be made automatic? Should fixed or floating rates reign in global currency markets? Must money be backed ...

History

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

A reminder of a sacred myth

October 7, 2025 • by Manousha Dhiwaghar

Judah Magnes, rabbi, orator, pacifist, and founding Chancellor of the Hebrew University, has long haunted the political margins of Israeli and Palestinian history. Too Zionist for the anti-statist left, too pacifist for the militarizing Yishuv, and too binational for a nation determined to consolidate, Magnes occupies a strange position in ...

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

Activism

A Lost Utopia

A review of Göran Rosenberg’s Israel: A Personal History

October 7, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

In a speech delivered to the United States Congress on July 25, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu issued a sharp retort to protestors against Israel’s genocide in Gaza: They call Israel a colonialist state. Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah ...

History

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades

September 16, 2025 • by Catherine Simpson Bueker

Catherine Simpson Bueker explores the legacy of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act and how Vietnamese refugees in America reshaped US society....

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

Gender

The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Elections have empowered a strongman government—and police and military are back to banning music

June 25, 2025 • by Rachmi Diyah Larasati

Sukatani, a punk band from Central Java, are known for critiquing the interconnected violence of police, military, and religious institutions. I like to play their music in my Minneapolis house—and share it on my Instagram—to protest the return of fascism in Indonesia and globally. So early this year, I was ...

History

Street Tulips

The outbreak of war has exposed, and exacerbated, fault lines in the Iranian diaspora

Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

An excerpt from The Tears of Other People: A history and memoir of displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Portsmouth, Displacement, and Belonging in The Tears of Other People

A conversation with author E. M. Ippolito about the settler colonialist roots of modern displacement and urban renewal

The Words We Learn to Fear

How authoritarianism begins with the policing of language

Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

In an excerpt from Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, the author surveys how left-wing intellectuals responded to 9/11

From William Lloyd Garrison to Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

A brief genealogy of nonviolent resistance

Goldbugs

An excerpt from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

A reminder of a sacred myth

A Lost Utopia

A review of Göran Rosenberg’s Israel: A Personal History

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades

The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Elections have empowered a strongman government—and police and military are back to banning music

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