Bylines

Liza Featherstone

Farmer sits on porch while behind him child stares through window and dust storm envelopes farm.

Working-Class Artists Thrived in the New Deal Era

During the New Deal, mass left movements and government funding spawned a boomlet in working-class art. For once, art wasn’t just the province of the rich.
Senator Joseph McCarthy (left) during the Army-McCarthy hearings, with Pvt. G. David Schine (center) and Roy Cohn (right), June 7, 1954, in Washington, DC.

McCarthyite Laws Targeting Leftists Are Still on the Books Across the Country

Communists were excluded from an Oklahoma Pride festival recently, a reminder of how easily the Red Scare’s mechanisms for state repression can be revived.
Ronald Reagan with James Watt

Good Riddance to the Architect of the GOP’s Environmental Culture Wars

James Watt was a fiery evangelical, a cultural laughingstock—and instrumental in shaping modern GOP rhetoric on the environment.
Nixon outdoors making his famous double-v hand gesture.

Nixon Was the Weirdest Environmentalist

Richard Nixon helped establish Earth Day and poured millions of dollars into conservation, despite his own ambivalence about the environmental movement.
Students paddling rafts on Milwaukee River

Remember When Earth Day Used to Be Cool?

Today, the holiday is just a chance for ExxonMobil to release nonsensical ad campaigns. But once upon a time, it was a radical success story.
Political cartoon of three pigs with oil company logos
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The Campus Underground Press

The 1960s and 70s were a time of activism in the U.S., and therefore a fertile time for campus newspapers and the alternative press.