The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

In the sixteenth century 300,000 people lived in the imperial quarter of Beijing, which housed the bureaucracy of the Ch... Read more

Why did World War I begin? Why did America enter the conflict? What place does the war hold in American historical memor... Read more

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States.Thanks to our generous do... Read more

The life and thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has been badly misunderstood, argues historian Erica Benner. Far from his us... Read more

Episode 28: Stephen Greenblatt by Lapham’s Quarterly

How do you measure change? It is often said that the twentieth century saw more change than any other period. But today’... Read more

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind... Read more

Barbara Ehrenreich thought there was something strange going on with the smart middle-aged people she knew. They seemed ... Read more

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.In a new book Pulitzer Prize–... Read more

In 1791 an American military expedition led by General Arthur St. Clair to assert U.S. claims in the region north and we... Read more

“History does not tell us what to do,” Civil War scholar Eric Foner says, but it does help us understand how the world g... Read more

One of America’s most enduring myths involves the fledging country’s supposed fortitude in refusing to import the class ... Read more

The history of paper is a story of technology following a need, argues Mark Kurlansky. The Chinese invented paper to kee... Read more

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads looks at the many ways the world connects itself, going well beyond trade routes to tel... Read more

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826. ... Read more

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Catherine Nixey, author of “The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical Wor... Read more

In France the period from the summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871 has come to be known as the terrible year: Franc... Read more

“Two and a half decades after the collapse of the USSR, it seems the strangest of anachronisms that Vladimir Illyich Len... Read more

The period of American history that extends from 1865 to 1896, Stanford historian Richard White writes in the introducti... Read more