On the Surface of Things

Recent News

• At the NYT Opinionator, Stanley Fish explored Ronald Dworkin’s “religious atheism” and what Religion without God can bring to current discussions about ethics.
• On the 100th anniversary of his birth, Smithsonian Magazine explored the legacy of Albert Camus—author of Algerian Chronicles—in the country of his birth.
• Minnesota Public Radio’s The Daily Circuit chose Robert Morrison’s annotated edition of Jane Austen’s classic Persuasion as their Book Pick of the Week.
• Christopher McKnight Nichols, author of Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age, spoke with the Christian Science Monitor about America’s new isolationism.

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October 1: Excavating the Bay of Bengal

The historian Daniel Richter’s Before the Revolution is a centuries-deep excavation of the multiple pasts of the land that became the United States. “Excavation” is Richter’s own term, a metaphor that guides the book and offers a fruitful way of imagining the lineage of a land. “The American Revolution,” he explains, “submerged earlier strata of society, culture, and politics, but those ancient worlds remain beneath the surface to mold the nation’s current contours.” He describes these remaining traces, these temporal palimpsests, as “layered pasts,” the new always a product of the old, which itself must be understood in order to fully know the present. In hi…