Person

Aziz Rana

Bylines

Related Excerpts

The Dig
Podcast
The Dig

Universalizing American Liberty

Aziz Rana overturns conventional accounts of American history, from settlement and Revolution to the Populists and the present day. He argues that settler-colonialism, empire, and a brutally exploitative economic system grounded in racial subjugation have always been at the core of the American project. But radical thinkers and movements have consistently stepped forward at critical junctures to propose transformative alternatives that would make American freedom universal.
Sections of the US Constitution torn to be used as pennants.

Is the United States Too Devoted to the Constitution?

A new book argues that worship of the Constitution has distorted our politics.
1976, bicentennial celebration banner in a grocery store.

The Birthday Party No One Wants: Why Americans Aren't Celebrating the Semiquincentennial

The semiquincentennial and why nostalgia can’t meet the moment.
Midcentury Black marchers walk down the street, one carrying a sign memorializing Crispus Attucks.

New Declarations

By invoking the American Revolution, 20th-century anticolonial figures connected their project with the movement for civil rights in the United States.
Picture of the many different people that make up the US.

The Right to Leave

Thomas Jefferson was a proponent of open migration. But who qualified as a refugee?
A mostly African American audience listens to a speaker at the 5th Pan-African Conference, 1945

The New Black Internationalism

The Movement for Black Lives has developed an incipient internationalist language and vision, with the potential to remap America’s place in the world.
Two men sitting on a couch and laughing, with an American flag behind them

The Conceit of American Indispensability

As we mine the 1940s for alternate visions of international order, we must not presume that the US remains the benevolent center of global politics.

The Myth of the American Frontier

Greg Grandin’s new book charts the past and present of American expansionism and its high human costs.
Mural of Pauli Murray.

On Memorial Day, Weaponizing the American Flag

As a young woman, civil rights pioneer Pauli Murray discovered that the flag could be used as a symbol of defiance.