Latest posts
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The Communist Manifesto: Reading Marx Without the Caricature
Few documents have been more thoroughly read about and less thoroughly read than the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the slim pamphlet Karl Marx and…
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The Hammer and the Fire: How the Witch Hunts Happened
Between roughly 1450 and 1750, somewhere on the order of forty to sixty thousand people in Europe and its colonies were executed for the crime of…
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Gatekeepers of Fascism: How Authoritarianism Gets Normalized
Authoritarian regimes are not, in the modern era, usually built by authoritarians. They are built by the people who were supposed to stop them. This is…
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Political Violence in America: A Long, Recurring Shadow
On the morning of July 11, 1804, the sitting Vice President of the United States rowed across the Hudson to a ledge in Weehawken, New Jersey, and shot the…
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Manufacturing an Enemy: How Propaganda Dehumanizes
Propaganda did not kill six million people. Police killed them, and soldiers, and bureaucrats who stamped the forms, and the railwaymen who drove the…
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Machiavelli’s The Prince, Five Centuries On
In 1513, a recently tortured and unemployed Florentine bureaucrat sat down in exile on his small farm at Sant’Andrea and wrote a short book he hoped would…