Justice

We can’t fix our immigration policy without understanding its history.

To alleviate voters' fears during the Civil War, Northern governors refused to open their states to formerly enslaved refugees.

Abolishing slavery wasn’t enough. Someone had to actually free the enslaved people of the American south.

It was 1872 and the commander-in-chief kept riding his horse too fast through the streets of Washington.

The lawsuit against Harvard forces us to talk about Asian Americans' role in the racial equity debate.

CNN's firing of Hill fits into a troubling history of repressing black voices on Palestine.

A decade before Roe, Pat Maginnis’ radical activism—and righteous rage—changed the abortion debate forever.

John Adams’s famous defense of the British may not be, as we’ve understood it, an expression of principle and the rule of law.

A new book shows how women's leadership in black nationalist movements has always been hidden in plain sight.

Unfair maneuver or a strong warning to would-be criminals?

The marketing of stewardesses’ bodies was long an integral part of airline marketing strategies.

Reviving race science plays into centuries of oppression.

A Supreme Court case about jurisdiction in an obscure murder has huge implications for tribes.

Passage of the ERA seemed like a sure thing. So why did it fail to become law?

Understanding the politics behind Cooper Union's 'We Dissent' exhibition.

A Pulitzer historian assesses what we are to make of UVA’s founder, 200 years hence.

Abortion and America’s new sectional divide.

An oral history of weed legalization’s first wave in the 1990s.

In the 1980s, millions of antinuclear activists took to the streets, forcing Western governments to respond to our demands.

Black people emerged from the war bloodied and scarred. Still, the war marked a turning point in their struggles for freedom.

Losing the support of the Supreme Court is disappointing, but it need not be the death knell of progress.

A side-by-side look at some of the political protests that have shaped American politics over the past hundred years.

Its purpose 150 years ago was to incorporate former slaves into the nation.

Not directly. But it's more complicated than you think.

For years, Chicago cops tortured false confessions out of hundreds of black men. Years later, the survivors fought for reparations.

A review of David Blight's new biography of Frederick Douglass.

History reminds us that firm and sometimes violent opposition to racists is a time-honored American tradition.

Voting rights are often associated with the Civil Rights Movement, but this fight extends throughout American history.

50 years after King's death, his image has been transformed and stripped of its radicalism.

Women anthropologists, face assault in the field, exposing victim blaming, institutional failures, and ethical gaps in academia.