The history of classical Athens reveals a form of political power that is easy to overlook precisely...
Economic noncooperation succeeded precisely because it avoided the language and posture of revolt while striking at the...
Slavery was sustained not only by violence on plantations or decisions in Parliament, but by the routine...
Noncooperation in India demonstrated that power is most vulnerable not when it is attacked, but when it...
The Roman experience demonstrates that the repression of speech rarely begins with overt brutality. It begins with...
The history of the Star Chamber demonstrates that repression does not require the abandonment of law. On...
The history traced here demonstrates that the suppression of dissent in the United States has rarely depended...
The lesson of the Pentagon Papers was not merely that the press prevailed in a landmark Supreme...
The struggle over history is never merely about preservation or scholarship. It is a struggle over legitimacy,...
The burning of history does not erase people, but it alters the conditions under which they must...
Civilization, as it was constructed by early modern empires, depended less on what it revealed than on...
When education abandons historical inquiry in favor of moral reassurance, it ceases to teach history at all....
From Late Bronze Age Mesopotamia to modern administrative states, power survives by changing form rather than relinquishing...
Rome’s experience demonstrates that political systems can endure long after leadership has ceased to merit confidence or...
The reign of Charles VI demonstrates that political systems are often capable of surviving incapacity far longer...
The historical lesson is not that institutions must be weakened to prevent abuse, but that they must...
Rome’s warning lies not in tyranny, but in normalization. The quiet death of civic law occurs when...
From medieval England onward, the requirement of independent authorization emerged as a response to power’s tendency to...
In Ancien Régime France, secret arrest and detention were not anomalies or abuses at the margins of...
Bureaucracies do not begin with the intention to destroy legal restraint or normalize violence. They learn to...
The history of Mesopotamian scribal culture reveals that repetition is not the enemy of civilization but one...
The history traced here suggests that repetition is not a symptom of cultural decay but a structural...
Print culture ultimately demonstrated that repetition is not the opposite of thought, but one of its enabling...
Across the long history traced here, moments of technological change repeatedly provoke the same fear: that creativity...
Even when you’re far from the place you once called home, staying connected to your roots can...
The Neo-Assyrian Empire demonstrates with unusual clarity how internal coercion can move from contingency to structure. By...
The Qing suppression of the Taiping Rebellion reveals a pattern of state survival that carries profound institutional...
The legacy of this sequence shaped the relationship between state and citizen long after the barricades were...
Tracing a pattern in which constitutional systems confront internal disorder not through overt rupture, but through incremental...
The religious movement’s beliefs about men and women’s equality has shaped members’ activism for centuries. Introduction On...