Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is the Merle Curti and Vilas Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History, and Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas.
As much as we may wish otherwise, history gives us few reasons to believe that its moral arc bends toward justice.