Page 14 | Harper's Magazine

History

21st Century Limited

by Kevin Baker,

The lost glory of America’s railroads

Voltaire in Vichy

by Jean Guéhenno,Translated by David Ball,

By Jean Guéhenno, from Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, out this month from Oxford University Press. Guéhenno (1890–1978) was a writer,…

Civil Rights Act

by Amy M. Tyson,

From an interview with Azie Mira Dungey, creator of the Web comedy series Ask a Slave, by Amy M. Tyson, a historian at DePaul University, published in February in The…

Spelling Plea

From a letter sent last November to the Campus Planning Board of the University of Colorado Boulder. Houusoo and Nowoo3 were nineteenth-century leaders of the Southern Arapaho in what is…

Army of Shadows

by Marcelle Hamel-Hateau,

From a memoir written in 1944 by Marcelle Hamel-Hateau, a schoolteacher in the Norman village of Neuville-au-Plain, included in D-Day Through French Eyes, by Mary Louise Roberts, published last month…

America’s Ancestry Craze

by Maud Newton,

Making sense of our family-tree obsession

The Quinoa Quarrel

by Lisa M. Hamilton,

Who owns the world’s greatest superfood?

Edible Complex

by Herodotus, Tom Holland,

From a new translation of Herodotus’ The Histories, by Tom Holland, out this month from Viking.

Green Old Party

by Ralph Nader,

By Ralph Nader, from Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, published last month by Nation Books.

Artful Dodger

From a note sent in 1917 to the Appeal Tribunal in Middlesex, England, which reviewed requests for exemption from military service during World War I. The note is included in…

The Office and Its Ends

by Nikil Saval,

By Nikil Saval, from Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, out this month from Doubleday. Saval is an editor of n+1.