In his seminal 1995 text, How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev at one point asks what the stakes of whiteness were: “It did not mean that they all became rich, or even ‘middle-class’ (however that is defined); to this day there are plenty of poor Irish…To Irish laborers, to become white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of being sold for life…” (More…)
A somewhat shorter version of this interview appeared on The Battleground a week ago. It included a very apt editorial introduction, which is not reproduced here, but which we recommend that you check out in situ. Sweden’s Adrestia is one of the most vital acts to come out of the vaunted Swedish d-beat scene in years. (More…)
In 10 October 1840, the brig Uncas departed Alexandria, Virginia. After a brief trip upstream to Washington D.C., the ship headed for Mobile. It was playing the coastwise slave trade, carrying 68 enslaved people to be sold in the lucrative slave markets of the Deep South. (More…)
What follows is the first in a series of three articles about the way that American politics has been influenced by postmodernism, or has, in fact, become postmodern. (More…)
Over the weekend I started idly jotting down some thoughts about the impeachment process which is currently spinning up against Mr. Trump. Before I had the chance to get very far, Ari Paul posted a piece entitled “The Left Case for Impeachment.” (More…)
Back in the long, long ago, I went off to graduate school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This was a jarring experience for me, both culturally (as a northerner born and bred) and climactically. I come from the high desert, where it doesn’t rain very much and most people can’t even spell humidity. (More…)
America prides itself on nothing so much as excellence. This applies as much to political dysfunction as to anything else. (More…)
Friedrich Kellner was born in Vaihingen an der Enz, in the German state of Württemburg in 1885, in the house of his father, a baker. At the age of 4, he relocated with his family to Mainz. (More…)
It is now nearly a decade since the death of Tony Judt. Judt’s work continues to present challenges, not least to those on the political left, of which he was a precise and unsparing (and occasionally irascible) critic. (More…)
The putative threat of the return of full-blown mid-20th-century fascism functions like a bad penny in the intellectual economy of modern Europe and North America. (More…)
At one point in 1943, British Home Secretary Herbert Morrison claimed that conceding self-government to the colonies would be the equivalent of giving a child of ten “a latch key, a bank account, and a shotgun.” (More…)
What follows is in the nature of a thought experiment. I am not a lawyer, and I have only a layman’s familiarity with the ins and outs of the law. (More…)