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Buffy of the Fat Boys playing turntables in 1985.

Questlove’s Personal History of Hip-Hop

An elegiac retelling of rap's origins, "Hip-Hop Is History" also ends with a sense of hope.
A crowd of Feminist protestors marching in New York.

A New Look at the Feminist Earthquake

How women's liberation transformed America and why our understanding of 1963-1973 needs to include more voices.
Close-up of E.E. Cummings, looking off to the side.

The Peculiar Legacy of E.E. Cummings

Revisiting his first book, "The Enormous Room," a reader can get a sense of everything appealing and appalling in his work.
A drawing of a crowd of people standing around the Wakasa stone in a crate.

The Recollector

How the Wakasa stone, a memorial to a Japanese man murdered in a Utah internment camp, became the flash point of a bitter modern dispute.

Failures to Act

Almost 1,300 people say the state of New Hampshire failed to act to protect them from child abuse at youth facilities. Here’s what the allegations reveal.
Two 1950s cars in front of a diner

You Can’t Go Home Again

Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.
A river surrounded by trees and mountains

From the Reservation to the River: On the Complexities of Writing About a Native Childhood

Remembering the river helps me forget, at least for a moment, the challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy I experienced in my childhood.
The Fulton Fish Market.

When Your Childhood Belongs to Everyone: Growing Up in a Manhattan That Changed Forever on 9/11

Loft life above the Fulton Fish Market and the day that everything changed.
A woman drinking out of a mug

Tasting Indian Creek

I lived on Indian Creek with my grandparents after my mother suffered a nervous breakdown.
A nearly gutted department store escalator in Owings Mills Mall in Owings Mills, Maryland.

The Life and Death of the American Mall

The indoor suburban shopping center is a special kind of abandoned place.
Sunrise over the Appalachian Mountains

Thicker Than Water: A Brief History of Family Violence in Appalachian Kentucky

Knowing I come from people who lived hard lives and endured terrible things is difficult. Knowing that I come from someone who ruined lives haunts me.
A photograph of four people on donkeys from the late 1800s.

A Question of Legacy

Some of my ancestors had money, and some held awful beliefs. I set out to investigate what I once stood to inherit.
Opal Lee.

A Racist Mob Destroyed Her Home. She Was Given the Land 84 Years Later.

A racist mob forced Opal Lee and her family from their Fort Worth home. Now she has been given the land and a new house is being built for her.
A series of headshots of the members of R.E.M..

Was It Cooler Back Then?

A search for the memory of R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia.
A man lifts a child in the air. The boy is touching the man's face

60 Years Later, a Secret Service Agent Grapples with JFK Assassination

Paul Landis, 88, is one of the few survivors who had a firsthand view of Kennedy’s assassination 60 years ago Wednesday. He is only now telling his whole story.
A photograph of the back of a woman's head, superimposed over a photograph of a body of water as if looking out over it.

What if Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be?

As our faith in the future plummets and the present blends with the past, we feel certain that we’ve reached the point where history has fallen apart.
Book cover of "The Acrobat," featuring a jumbled facial picture of Cary Grant.

Acid’s First Convert, Cary Grant: On Edward J. Delaney’s “The Acrobat"

A novel illuminates a moment of psychedelic history that has often been overlooked: the emergence of LSD psychotherapy just before the moral panic took hold.

Why Generational Thinking Isn't Bull

Reflections on Pavement, Nirvana, the very meaning of history, and the end of neoliberalism.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Great Zimbabwe, circa 1996; photograph by Graham Smith.

Finding My Roots

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.
Secret Service agent Paul Landis, JFK, and Jackie Kennedy in crowd.

A New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held “Lone Gunman” Theory

Former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, largely silent for 60 years, says he found a bullet in Kennedy’s limo. Here's why that’s so significant, if true.
A man and a dog walk among blighted buildings in the Bronx.

The Persistence of American Poverty

“We could afford to end poverty,” Matthew Desmond tells us. That we don’t is a choice.
A man wearing sunglasses holding a sign

Kool Herc and the History (and Mystery) of Hip-Hop's First Day

Even as the world celebrates hip-hop turning 50, the debate over rap's birth date spins on.
Jim LaBelle, 76, an Indian boarding school survivor.

‘12 Years of Hell’: Indian Boarding School Survivors Share Their Stories

Forced by the federal government to attend the schools, generations of Native American children were sexually assaulted, beaten and emotionally abused.
A young Black boy pictured mid-flip, while his peers look on. In the background are a row of houses, one of which abandoned with the windows punched out.

What We Meant When We Said 'Crackhead'

“I’ve learned, through hundreds of interviews and years of research, is that what crack really did was expose every vulnerability of society.”
Collage of newspaper clippings with three images of Japanese Americans.

What Reparations Actually Bought

The U.S. government’s redress program for Japanese Americans showed that the money matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters.
Empty, dimly lit interior of shopping mall.

Nostalgia's Empire

We should interrogate nostalgia’s primacy without advocating for its eradication.

The Busboy

Witness to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Andrea Casali: The Personification of History Writing on the Back of Time, early 1760s

Ego-Histories

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.
Collage showing people gathering at the site of school shootings.

The Second Generation of School Shootings

The fear that overtook us that day in 1988 was unfamiliar to most Americans. Now all too many know how it feels.
Shemp Howard and Tiny Brauer in "Fling in the Ring"

The House Next Door to the Stooges

A visit to the old neighborhood.

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