By John A. Thompson (NHC Fellow, 1993–94) Why has the United States assumed so extensive and costly a role in world affairs over the last hundred years? The two most common answers to this question are "because it could" and "because it had to." Neither answer will do, according to this challenging re-assessment of the … Continued
By Michel-Rolph Trouillot (NHC Fellow, 1985–86) Michel-Rolph Trouillot places the West’s failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history, the Haitian Revolution, alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo and Christopher Columbus in this moving and thought-provoking meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history. Silencing … Continued
By Ruth W. Grant (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) Incentives can be found everywhere—in schools, businesses, factories, and government—influencing people’s choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power … Continued
Nineteenth-century, middle-class American women saw their behavior regulated by a social system known today as the cult of domesticity, which was designed to limit their sphere of influence to home and family. Yet within this space, they developed networks and modes of expression that allowed them to speak out on the major moral questions facing … Continued
In correspondence with her husband John as he and other leaders were framing a government for the United States, Abigail Adams (1744–1818) argued that the laws of the new nation should recognize women as something more than property and protect them from the arbitrary and unrestrained power men held over them.
In this excerpt from a podcast with National Humanities Center Robert D. Newman, U. S. Representative David Price reflects on the transformative experience of reading the work of Reinhold Niebuhr. Price notes how his exposure to Niebuhr in a Yale Divinity School classroom continues to shape his thinking about human nature and American democracy. Transcript … Continued