A forum for historians of political thought, philosophy, religion, literature, the social and natural sciences, music, architecture, and the visual arts.
📣 Announcing The 2026 MIH Lecture!
We’re thrilled to welcome Prof. Marlene L. Daut (Yale) for her talk:
“The King of Haiti and Black Statecraft in the Nineteenth Century.”
đź“… March 19, 2026
⏰ 2:15–3:45 PM CST
📍 Black Cultural Center Auditorium, Vanderbilt University
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Now on FirstView: Du Bois’s Eugenic Democracy? Inder S. Marwah examines how Darwinism, eugenics, and fin de siècle race sciences shaped W. E. B. Du Bois’s early political ideas on race and racial uplift bit.ly/47JWJOH
Now on FirstView: William Godwin as a democrat? Minchul Kim @mkim1789 analyzes Godwin’s ideas of democracy and the time-regime of European political thought in the Age of Revolutions bit.ly/3L7Kqmn
Now on FirstView: The “Woman’s Seed”? Ariane Viktoria Fichtl @threadofariane analyzes the discourse on “mental metempsychosis” that challenged the concept of the heritability of slavery and was at the heart of immediate abolitionism in Britain bit.ly/3JI5XBC
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Now on FirstView: Camilla Boisen reflects on the stories we tell ourselves about peace and genocide in her review essay of A. Dirk Moses’ @dirkmoses The Problems of Genocide and Lauren Benton’s They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence bit.ly/4pORCCp
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Now on FirstView: More Marx, Less Marxism? Ulrich Plass reviews the new Princeton edition of Marx’s Capital (Vol. 1) recently translated by Paul Reitte bit.ly/467NcQg
Now on FirstView: Abolition on the eve of revolution? Jennifer Pitts and Michael F. Suarez, S.J., examine Condorcet’s French translation of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s influential antislavery treatise and analyze its reception in France bit.ly/4rkICX0
Now on FirstView: Against the Caesarist crowd? Peter Giraudo analyzes Georges Sorel’s early democratic socialism during the Dreyfus affair and his ideas on workers’ dissociation from Parisian crowds as a necessary condition for socialist progress bit.ly/4k4m4qL
Now on FirstView: Civil society divided against itself? Pamela C. Nogales analyzes labor reformers’ fights for shorter hours in antebellum U.S. and the transatlantic debates over a global “social republic” bit.ly/3ZHlK7X
Now on FirstView: What happened to New England theology? Sam Gee analyzes the contemporary decline of scholarship on New England Theology and proposes a way forward for its study by going beyond evangelical readings of the sources bit.ly/4a1jI7s
Now on FirstView: Nayeli L. Riano reflects on the questions and methods of intellectual history in her review essay of Javier Fernández-Sebastián’s Key Metaphors for History and ElĂas Palti’s Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change bit.ly/4q1wSas
Now on FirstView: Jane Lydon reexamines the relationship between Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield through the lens of one of Bentham’s last projects: “Colonization Company Proposal” (1831) bit.ly/3WLKRW4
Now on FirstView: Ferenc Laczo discusses the historical narratives of “the West” and “Europe” in his review essay of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea and Anthony Pagden’s The Pursuit of Europe: A History bit.ly/4ph9xSq
Now on FirstView: Conservative Arab thought after Islam? Ahmed Dailami reconstructs the intellectual history of the Arab right through the work of philosopher Mohammed Jaber al-Ansari in the late 20th century bit.ly/3JROcQp
From MIH Archives: Where is British America in the Republic of Letters? Caroline Winterer explores the prospects and limits of digitally mapping the republic of letters and reframing our textual archive in spatial dimensions bit.ly/4cHYMSl
Now on FirstView: Governing the Miracle? @JuliaNordblad discusses the consequences of planetary perspective for political thought in her review essay of Blake and Gilman’s Children of a Modest Star and Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts bit.ly/3Wj57Ot