Recent stories of note:
“Three Visions for a New Penn Station”
Catesby Leigh, City Journal
Older New Yorkers must remember the original Pennsylvania Station, a 1910 Beaux-Arts masterpiece by McKim, Mead & White, with a little sadness, as it was torn down in 1963 to make way for a disappointing successor. In City Journal, Catesby Leigh reports on plans to oversee a redevelopment of the current station to accommodate future passenger growth. Leigh notes that the Trump administration has signaled that it wants to see a return in civic buildings to the grand classicism represented in the style of the original, although it is unclear if a future executive order would include train stations. Various plans are in the works to revitalize the station, with much attention focused on turning the transit hub into a through station and possibly taking over the space currently occupied by Madison Square Garden, but all have significant bureaucratic, engineering, and political hurdles. Three different plans grapple over whether to restore the current station to something like its grand predecessor, but the most likely of these plans, Leigh writes, would see the garden remain in place and the new station inhabit a modern, functional, rectangular, multi-story podium.
“Inventing a History: How Stalin Shaped the Soviet Collective Memory”
Bryan Karetnyk, The Times Literary Supplement
In 1937, Joseph Stalin personally commissioned the Short History of the USSR, which aimed to recontextualize the Soviet state with pre-revolutionary history. Bryan Karetnyk writes for The Times Literary Supplement that this represented a “seismic shift” in the nation’s understanding of history, as the book was circulated among a generation of students, with a million copies printed up through the mid-1950s. Unlike previous Bolshevik accounts of history, it encouraged Russians to embrace their pre-revolutionary past, tracing Soviet history back a thousand years to the beginning of Slavic civilization. This was no easy task for historians—in the middle of Stalin’s Great Terror, former heroes of state turn to enemies in a matter of days. David Brandenberger’s volume Stalin’s Usable Past: A Critical Edition of the 1937 “Short History of the USSR” reproduces the original text augmented with Stalin’s personal edits and annotations, as well as those of his lieutenant Andrei Zhdanov, to show how history was rewritten from the top down to shape an overarching ideological-historical narrative.
“‘Shakespeare: Then and There, Here and Now’ Review: Dismantling the Master”
Edward Rothstein, The Wall Street Journal
A new permanent exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library seeks to downplay the Bard’s monumental status in Western literature, according to Edward Rothstein in The Wall Street Journal. “Shakespeare: Then and There, Here and Now” appeared after an $80 million renovation of the ninety-three-year-old research library, founded by the late Standard Oil chairman Henry Folger (1857–1930) and his wife, Emily, (1858–1936). According to Rothstein, the exhibition offers some noteworthy displays, including the largest collection of First Folios ever exhibited in a single gallery, but the thrust of it appears numbingly revisionist. An opening panel asks, “Who was William Shakespeare? . . . A hero? An icon? The name on a book you never wanted to open,” and goes on to encourage visitors to “talk back to Shakespeare.” Rothstein writes that exhibition makes pains to associate Shakespeare with imperialism—because he lived during a time of British colonization—and “whiteness,” without any insight to Shakespeare’s racial metaphors or how his works “might transcend formulaic racial readings.” He opines that this premier institution of historical research seems to have reduced Shakespeare to anachronistic and overly simplified summations rather than inspiring visitors to understand critically Shakespeare’s legacy in Anglo-American language and culture.