David A. Bell

Both France and the United States were born in revolutions that overthrew kings, yet neither has ever stopped searching for a leader to embody the nation.

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.

An essay by the president of the American Historical Association generated a firestorm of criticism — but got some things right.

Joan Scott’s "On the Judgment of History" asks us to imagine the past without the idea of progress. But what gets left out in the process?

Why we should resist hero-worshipping Ukraine’s president.

On the ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

A new book by Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses the past and present challenges posed by authoritarianism, but misses the conditions in which it arises.

For a long time, European historians paid little attention to the extraordinary series of events that now goes by the name of the Haitian Revolution.

In modern democracies, who gets to determine what counts as truth—an elite of experts or the people as a whole?

The president's stand on the Confederate hero represents the kind of moral relativism that conservatives usually decry.