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Brazil’s federal police are investigating a plot by far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro and his allies to prevent Lula from taking office in 2023. They’ve now charged the conspirators with scheming to murder Lula, his vice president, and a senior…

Junko Takeda is Professor of History and Chair of the Citizenship and Civic Engagement Program in the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University. A historian of France and its engagement with Asian empires and…

Estelle Freedman received the 2024 Oral History Association Article Award for “‘Not a Word Was Said Ever Again’: Silence and Speech in Women’s Oral History Accounts of Sexual Harassment,” which was published in The Oral History Review in 2023.

Book bans are skyrocketing in America, finds a new report from PEN America, a non-profit organization that champions free expression in writing. During the 2023-24 school year, over 10,000 books were banned across the country, more than…

To understand the historical document, we need to understand its deeper historical context, Gienapp argues in a new book.

Constitutional originalism, a prominent legal theory espoused by many conservative judges and legal thinkers,…

These days, American constitutional law looks obsessively to the past. Interpreters of the U.S. Constitution have always appealed to history to understand what it means, but never to this extent or with these consequences. As the most recent…

Gili Kliger joined the Stanford History Department as Lecturer in September 2024. She received her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 2022. A historian of modern Europe, Gili’s first book manuscript, tentatively titled Found in…

LiPo Ching / Stanford University

In a new book, Caroline Winterer explores how the geologic record upended biblical notions about the Earth’s age for 19th-century Americans, whose reconstructed understanding of time affected their sense of identity and purpose.

Americans…

Stanford University professor Jonathan Gienapp, author of the new book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique, is joined by Stephen Sachs of Harvard Law School to discuss Gienapp’s challenge to originalists…

LiPo Ching / Stanford University

For a few hundred years, the New World of the Americas was thought to be genuinely new. But in the course of the nineteenth century, Americans became increasingly uncertain about the ground beneath their feet. Canal building uncovered strange…