Keen On

Early today, we posted a conversation with Celeste Marcus, LIBERTIES Quarterly managing editor, about her hard-hitting “Hate Lands” essay in the Fall 2024 issue. In the same issue, there’s an equally hard hitting piece by the Rutgers historian, Katherine C. Epstein. But whereas Marcus goes after Trump and Putin, Epstein’s ire is reserved for her fellow American historians who, she believes, are, literally, “killing history”. And Epstein doesn’t pull her punches in this conversation either. America, she told me, is the “world’s teenager” in terms of (not) making sense of its own historical narrative. Meanwhile, “the donkeys are leading the donkeys” inside American history departments, creating a crisis of this most essential academic craft.Katherine C. Epstein is associate professor of history at Rutgers-Camden.  She is currently working on her second book, which examines government secrecy, defense contracting, intellectual property, and the political economy of power projection.  Her first book, Torpedo: In