David Reid

is the editor-in-chief of Dispatches and author of The Brazen Age: New York City and The American Empire. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Contributions

Tocqueville in Trumpland

David Reid

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October 28, 2025

“Democracy in America is at times a strange, haunted book, but then, the United States in the Age of Jackson was in many ways a strange, haunted place.” —David Reid

A History of the History of Empire, V

David Reid

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November 10, 2024

“For two centuries from the 1560s Spain’s Manila galleons sailed the long way,from Manila to Acapulco, Mexico, missing the Golden Gate" —David Reid

A History of the History of Empire, IV

David Reid

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September 28, 2023

"In the emergent West of the 11th and 12th centuries, and especially in Byzantium, its most civilized part, there was nothing but reversals of fortune."—David Reid

Living in Eternity

David Reid

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August 11, 2023

"The Postwar begins by confounding 'conventional wisdom.' From the New York intellectuals to the Republican politicos all had something to rue." —David Reid

A History of the History of Empire, III

David Reid

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August 21, 2022

"Constantinople’s quarrelsome, riotous, and enterprising citizenry prospered behind huge, apparently impregnable walls."

A History of the History of Empire, II

David Reid

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July 29, 2021

"Riotous and dissolute, the millennial Romans lived amid surroundings for which the word “surreal” might have been invented."

A History of the History of Empire

David Reid

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January 26, 2021

“It is not at all difficult to imagine the end of Empire, because history has witnessed the ends of so many; it might even be such endings are what history consists of.”—David Reid