The Genealogies of Modernity Journal
Recipes for a Different Modernity
Using these recipes privileges cultural memory and tradition over efficiency and precision. Thus, we participate in the ritual of cooking not as a means of scientific inquiry or perfection, but to strengthen the community ties that bring us together at the table.
Alexandrea Pérez Allison on cookbooks and modernity.
We Have Always Never Been Modern
Modernity is more akin to an epistemological front, waxing and waning here and there in history, whose distribution might be unevenly spread across different human societies at any given moment.
Tim Howles expands on Bruno Latour's genealogies
Modernity in the Balance
Ideas have afterlives: they live on in subcultures that intentionally preserve them, in practices that have long lost their justification, and in our contradictions and nagging doubts.
John Buchmann offers a genealogy of balance and economics.
The Legacy of Margaret Sanger
It is interesting to imagine an alternative history, one where Sanger had received the support she sought from eugenicists. What would our feminist genealogies look like then?
G. Marie Aquilina examines Margaret Sanger’s place in feminist genealogy
A Genealogy of Progressivism: Twentieth-Century Gnostic Liberalism
The roots of the present distemper go back to the turn of the twentieth century, when figures such as John Dewey sought to delete the Christian DNA from the genome of liberalism and insert Gnostic DNA in its place.
Andrew Latham does a genealogy of Gnostic Liberalism
Mountain Modernity: Genealogies of Climbing
The future of climbing is not modern. It is post-secular, mystical, communal, and intensely embodied, with technology merely incidental.
Ryan McDermott asks: When did climbing become modern?
A Mobile Proposal
We may still take the best of what calling cards have to offer: a more robust etiquette for managing our digital, social lives on a more humane timescale.
Kirsten Hall loses her phone and looks to the 18th Century for guidance.
How We Became Superstitious Again: A Genealogical Fable
Millions waited for a new, unknown magic to save the world from a final tragedy. The occultic had returned, but no one knew how to see it anymore.
Jason Blakely imagines the rise and fall of science and the occult.
Science, Magic, and the Atom in Tomorrowland
Disney’s atom acts as an all-powerful sentient being, radioisotopes resemble the magical dust of Tinkerbell, and atomic energy emerges as the ultimate transmutation of matter that can lead to limitless health and wealth.
Christopher Fite finds a mix of power, ideology, and racism in a Disney film
Toward a Hopeful Decadence
Douthat begs us to consider the possibilities that we reached for in the past, less out of nostalgia, and more as inspiration: a cry of ‘Why not?’ that can lift us beyond screens, comfort, and deadlock toward a common goal.
Michael J. Nevadomski reviews Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society.
The Racialization of Crime: A Brief Genealogy
The racialization of crime in the United States can be traced all the way back to the earliest legislation directly addressing race relations: the slave codes.
Miranda Pilipchuk traces a genealogy of racism and sexism in the American judicial system.
Magic and Modernity
Instead of free-thinking Deists, a new generation of physicians argued that the experience of paranormal phenomena indicated a kind of mental or physiological illness.
Richard Yoder looks to early modernity to examine magic, science, and the origins of modernity.
Haunted Modernity: Francis Bacon’s Ghost Ship
We are dealing with a ghost ship, a reminder that the modernity we seek to understand is profoundly haunted.
Christopher Fite asks what a “haunted modernity” means for the history of science.
The Last Days of Business as Usual
Kirsten Hall revisits literary history and compares our current COVID-19 pandemic to pandemics of the past.
The Decline of the Nuclear Family, and the Rise of the Club
Kirsten Hall responds to David Brooks and the decline of the nuclear family.
Teaching with Anachronism
Kirsten Hall addresses problems with pedagogy in today’s classrooms and creates a genealogical syllabus.
Anxious and Angry: Alec Ryrie’s Genealogy of Emotions and Belief
Terence Sweeney reviews Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt.
On Influence
Timothy Barr reflects on popular culture the way stars still influence us—whether Taylor Swift or Sirius.
American Foundings: Two Genealogies of American Racism
Terence Sweeney explores two genealogies of racism: Original Sin or corrupt DNA.