Lily Rothman

Rothman is managing editor at TIME. She was also the founding editor of TIME’s history section.

Recent Articles

Norman Rockwell's Vision of the Four Freedoms Left Some People Out. These Artists Are Trying to Fill Those Gaps

Updated — Nov. 15, 2018: The cover of TIME’s latest issue features a modern version of Freedom of Worship, the iconic 1943 Norman Rockwell painting. Here’s the story behind the picture. It was no surprise...

By Lily Rothman

Why Modern Misogynists Love Ancient History, and What They Get Wrong About It, According to an Expert

'Not All Dead White Men' author Donna Zuckerberg talks to TIME

By Lily Rothman

The Surprising Role of Circus Performers in the Fight for Women's Suffrage

The Barnum & Bailey's Circus Women's Equal Rights Society was founded in 1912

By Lily Rothman

The Meaning of 'Presumed Innocent' Has Evolved. Here's How the Kavanaugh Hearings Fit Into That History

The presumption of innocence has two separate meanings, defined over the course of centuries of jurisprudence.

By Lily Rothman

More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think. Here's Why That History Isn't Better Known

"We want to remember ourselves as always having been on the right side in this war"

By Lily Rothman

What to Know About the Surprising Modern History of Contraception

"You hear women in the present saying that men should take responsibility, but men were given responsibility for millennia and they didn’t do it very well."

By Lily Rothman

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin Looks to Past Presidents for Lessons the World Could Use Right Now

Doris Kearns Goodwin lives surrounded by American history. Her home in Concord, Mass., is minutes from the site of one of the first battles of the American Revolution. The house itself, cool on a day...

By Lily Rothman

20 Years Of Google Has Changed the Way We Think. Here's How, According to a Historian of Information

In the years since Google was founded on Sept. 4, 1998, the way people process information has changed—in one very specific way

By Lily Rothman

'Operation Finale' Shows the Capture of Nazi Adolf Eichmann. But What Happened at His Trial Changed History, Too

"The trial’s purpose was to put the Holocaust on trial"

By Lily Rothman

How John McCain's Years as a Vietnam POW Shaped His Life

He was self-deprecatingly aware of the irony of becoming well-known as a military man for what he did as a prisoner

By Lily Rothman

What People Get Wrong About the History of American Judaism Before the Civil War

Steven R. Weisman, author of 'The Chosen Wars,' spoke to TIME about what people get wrong about American Judaism before the Civil War

By Lily Rothman

Read Babe Ruth's 1948 Obituary: 'He Was Unforgettable, Even When He Struck Out'

"He was color itself—a fellow built on heroic, swaggering lines, an enormous head on a barrel of a body"

By Lily Rothman

Desperate Women, Desperate Doctors and the Surprising History Behind the Breastfeeding Debate

"What it meant was that a wealthy baby lived and a poor baby died"

By Lily Rothman

Martha Nussbaum on What's Behind America's Fear Problem—And What to Do About It

"Men in philosophy, and they were all men at the time, had just simply not seen fit to investigate the messier parts of the personal life"

By Lily Rothman

The Surprising Reason Why So Many Civil War Memorials Look Almost Exactly the Same

Find out in this clip from '10 That Changed America'

By Lily Rothman

'It's Not That the Story Was Buried.' What Americans in the 1930s Really Knew About What Was Happening in Germany

An issue of TIME from 1933 helps lead to a key insight, explains a curator from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

By Lily Rothman

This Was President Truman's Powerful Message on Why the U.S. Should Help Refugees

Read the message he sent to Congress

By Lily Rothman

The Apartment Building in 'Rosemary's Baby' Is Also a Star. Here's the Not-So-Secret Story Behind Its Name

The movie featured "the most unpleasant pregnancy on record," TIME's reviewer quipped

By Lily Rothman

The World War II Auto Mechanic in This Photo Is Queen Elizabeth II. Here's the Story Behind the Picture

Queen Elizabeth II was the first woman in the royal family to serve full-time in Britain's women's military during WWII

By Lily Rothman

Previously Unpublished Photos Capture Life in Cuba Before Revolution

From turn-of-the-century street scenes to 1950s glamor

By Lily Rothman
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