Elizabeth Stice, whose blog posts you can read every Monday here, has two essays elsewhere this week that highlight two separate crises in higher education. The first piece ran at History News Network on Sunday. A few excerpts as a […]
Indiana Jones and Excavating Antiquity
It’s not about fortune and gloryÂ
A new series of ancient biographies offers yet another reason to love the genre
In the mid-second century BCE, Cato the Elder, Rome’s most conservative politician of his day, published his Origines, the first Roman history in Latin. Only fragments of the work survive, but we know that Cato’s history featured an unusual approach […]
Historical reflections on civilians and war one year into the invasion of Ukraine
Eleven years ago this month, I had the privilege of co-organizing (with the amazing Nicola Foote, a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean) a conference on civilians and warfare in world history. We eventually published an edited collection of […]
Our brave new world unfolding: Whole Body Gestational Donation
In his 1932 novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley described an imagined future world, where pregnancy as we know it no longer exists. Freed from the complex and repressive requirements of marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth, the liberated citizens of this […]
Vocation and Public University Education: Reflections on Developments in Florida and Beyond
On a sweltering mid-August day in 1999, the day before I began my first year of college at the University of Virginia, I timidly knocked on the office door of the legendary David Kovacs, a world-known scholar of Euripides (although […]
Welcome to the Arena
In his essay that launched Current in 2021, Eric Miller exhorted readers and writers to join him “In the Arena” and have some intellectual fun in exploring topics that are, most of the time, quite serious. And, indeed, in a […]
Historians and Lying
Why are we skeptics to the core?
INTERVIEW: Agnes Howard on Pregnancy and Motherhood
Pregnancy reshapes not just the body, but character as well
Happy New Year, 1991!
In history, three decades can be everything—or nothing at all
What Child Is This?
A new law prompts nagging questions about the value of human life
Running for Office the Roman Way
An ancient campaign manual reveals a familiar political foe
The Dancing Children of Stalingrad
Eighty years later, childhood is again a casualty of war
Gorbachev’s Legacy: Moscow (Still) Doesn’t Believe in Tears
Over three decades after his resignation ended the USSR, how much has changed?
“Joshua Was Here”
What are the politics of excavating the past in modern Jerusalem?
Bad Citizens in a Democracy
The Athenian experiment gives us hope
Socrates Moves Right
Contrary to contemporary conservative opinion, the sage of Athens may not be democracy’s best friend
FORUM: The End of Roe, Day Two
A time to listen
Dinner and a Show: Summer Edition
For fathers, all the world’s a stage—even the front yard
The Poetical Souls of Russian Dictators
What do we make of these creatures of contrasts—and literature on the lips of war criminals?