The ways we talk about the future have been decidedly...darker over the past half century, a hard turn from the sunny optimism that informed most visions of the world to come for decades before that.

This article is part of The Week's 20th anniversary section, looking back at how the world has changed since our first issue was published in April 2001. It originally appeared in the April 16, 2021 ...

African American history does not provide a great vantage point on the history of human flourishing. Instead, it is one of the most depressing subfields in American history—second perhaps only to ...

War might not be the locomotive of history, but it drives the writing of the world’s most-published historian. Jeremy Black’s extraordinary body of work regularly returns to themes in military history ...