Archive
Category: History
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Living Alongside Disagreement Is a Skill Learned Late
We tend to treat the concept of pluralism as if it were a polished, civic achievement—a tidy box we checked once we learned to…
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Institutional Care Has a Long Genealogy
I remember the specific, cloying scent of industrial lavender floor wax and stale coffee that used to cling to my coat after a twelve-hour…
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Teaching Reading Was Itself a Reform
I remember sitting in a cramped, dimly lit community center years ago, watching a well-meaning instructor distribute glossy, color-coded workbooks to a group of…
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Factory Laws Came From Unlikely Alliances
I have always found it rather tiresome how history books tend to present social reform in the nineteenth century as a tidy, inevitable march…
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A Long Campaign With Mixed Motives
I remember sitting in a cramped, dimly lit community hall years ago, watching a young organizer pace the floor with a fervor that was…
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Honest History Includes What Was Done Badly
I’ve sat through far too many seminars where academics and activists use increasingly dense, polished language to signal their virtue, as if a more…
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Mission and Empire Were Entangled and Not Identical
I remember sitting in a cramped, dimly lit hospital waiting room years ago, listening to a young man try to explain his profound grief…
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The Conflict Story Is Mostly Nineteenth Century Invention
I remember sitting in a sterile hospital room years ago, watching a young man stare at a monitor that was providing him with more…
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Criticism Produced Better Arguments on Both Sides
I remember sitting in a sterile hospital room late one Tuesday night, listening to a man try to make sense of a terminal diagnosis…
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Toleration Began as Exhaustion, Not Principle
I remember sitting in a cramped, fluorescent-lit palliative care room thirty years ago, listening to a man argue with his brother over a theological…