The Measures of Man

Recent News

• An excerpt from Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others considering the ways in which life and literature teach us to see others as different was published in Prospect.
• Lincoln Mullen, author of The Chance of Salvation, spoke with the Atlantic about the long history of religious conversion in America.
• An extract adapted from Steven Lubar’s Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present that considers why museum collections matter was published online by Smithsonian magazine.
• Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of The Americanization of Narcissism, considered the ways in which President Trump’s narcissism is a resource for—not an impediment to—his electoral and political success at the L.A. Review of Books.

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August 18: Roger B. Taney, Slavery’s Great Chief Justice

Included among the Confederate statues whose removal has provided white supremacists with thin cover to parade hatred in the feeble guise of heritage have been several monuments to U.S. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Most remembered for his painfully racist and staunchly proslavery opinion in 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford, Taney is one of three Supreme Court Justices whom legal scholar Paul Finkelman considers in his forthcoming Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court. Placing Taney alongside Chief Justice John Marshall and Associate Justice Joseph Story, Finkelman documents how this trio—whom he calls the most important Supreme Court Just…