Matthew Stanley

Dec 11, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Frances Wood |Matthew Stanley |Hunter Dukes |Richard Lea

The Ming doctor Li Shizhen’s pharmacopoeia is widely known in China, and the man himself has appeared on postage stamps and in a popular film of 1956, in which he is depicted clambering over mountains in search of medicinal herbs. The Ben cao gang mu was first printed in the year of his death, 1593, but is still recognized as the main historical source of reference for Chinese materia medica – contemporary researchers plough through it looking for new cures from ancient recipes.

Jan 5, 2024 | jacobin.com | Matthew Stanley

One in every eight public statues in the United States celebrates a Confederate soldier. Despite the recent spate of monument removal, hundreds of shrines remain to patrician slaver-secessionists, including Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. If representation in bronze and marble serves as a measuring stick, the Confederacy is, certainly in relative terms, the most commemorated group or cause in the nation’s history.

Sep 15, 2023 | slate.com | Paul Renfro |Matthew Stanley

History Popular memory has not been kind to Bill Clinton. Even many liberals and progressives now disavow the Clinton legacy. The (very solid) case against him, from the left: His presidency was marked by retrograde domestic policies that authored mass incarceration, workfare, unpopular trade deals, financial deregulation, and austerity through deficit reduction.

May 24, 2023 | jacobin.com | Matthew Stanley

The path toward that position has been a long and meandering one. The standard telling goes like this: early US socialists were not interested in race. In fact, ideological dogmatism, isolation within Northern urban ethnic enclaves, black suspicion of white-led organizations, and the personal racism of members cut off socialists from African Americans’ struggle for their rights.

Apr 17, 2023 | jacobin.com | Matthew Stanley

Kretz’s superb history of how the shared radical hopes of land, homes, and pensions for all were pared down to intrusive, technocratic enterprises of staggering complexity speaks directly to the enduring problems of means-tested federal relief. In fact, Administering Freedom can be read as an endorsement of universalist welfare policies, contra the “bewilderingly convoluted, decentralized, privatized, and means-tested” politics of incrementalism.