Presumably, it has never been a good time for the humanities. Perhaps because it is simply in the nature of these disciplines to find themselves perpetually in crisis, lagging behind the times, dragging their leaden feet made out of indelible words, asking for more and more time in a civilization perpetually in a rush. They are constantly on the edge of a precipice, but we cannot deny that, while they awkwardly balance on the edge, they do enjoy magnificent views. After all, our fields do not thrive on security, on solid facts, on controlled experiments with measurable outcomes.

Analyzing the staging and composition of archival photography of South Asian laborers in 19th-century Jamaica, Anna Arabindan-Kesson reflects upon the role of photography in evoking particular colonial narratives about indenture, the perception of Indian laborers’ assimilability, and Jamaica’s modernization.

Is methodological rigor all that is necessary to establish a humanities curriculum, or do humanists have a duty to center moral principles in our pedagogy? How might we bridge the two extremes of delineating humanities departments in American universities—rigidly bordered individual fields versus large umbrella programs like the Global Humanities? What could exist between the scales of the local and the global?

How should we use intellectual history to inform our thinking about freedom in the advent of digital technologies? Quentin Skinner argues that the prevalent liberal idiom is unable to address the political challenges in the world of big tech.

Thousands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work side by side with African Americans on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. Though now a largely forgotten episode in history, their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

[T]he room conveys a hypnotic stillness. The chair itself is luminous, bathed in a clear wash of light that seems to come from a skylight overhead. The still space is framed right and left by three shadowy black doorways, functioning like ominous sentinels guarding the scene. The horizontal geometry created by the sprinklers, the wall, and the floor is calm. The austere, isolated chair sits on a rectangular floorplate. The famous "silence" sign is framed against a black door. The image is silent and expectant.[1]

I 

James Reichert examines twentieth-century Japanese period fiction as a lens to understand contemporary U.S. constructions of the past, political and cultural phenomena, and the rise of the "Make America Great Again" movement.

Brault examines the promise of data as the opportunity to examine methods, to do something new and to vary methods, to scale claims and the type and amount of evidence presented to substantiate them, and to deepen and complicate arguments.