Justice

The enduring impact of President Johnson’s Crime Commission.

Interrogating dominant white perspectives in mainstream media outlets, government records, and in the very definition of what constitutes a credible source.

Slave ownership was once as entrenched in American life as gun ownership.

Today, nearly 2.2 million Americans are behind bars. Can contemporary mass incarceration's roots be traced to LBJ's Great Society?

As a young woman, civil rights pioneer Pauli Murray discovered that the flag could be used as a symbol of defiance.

Conservative Christians are out to restore their historical legal privileges.

Since slavery, dogs have been used to intimidate and control African Americans.

The Kerner report neglected that police were not simply careless with black lives; they deliberately sought to punish black lives.

The conclusions of the 1968 Kerner Report portrayed race relations like no other report in history.

It's impossible to revisit the history of America's quest for racial purity without sometimes being reminded of the current public discourse.

A century ago, the commonwealth's leaders weren't circumspect about their motives.

The budding mogul had a soft spot (but a short memory) for wiseguys.

The civil rights movement was not nearly as admired by white Americans in its own time as we imagine it being.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Until fairly recently, President Clinton's narrow definition of adultery would have been backed up by the courts.

How efforts to bolster religious liberty set off a chain of unintended consequences.

The movement finally gets the big, bold history it deserves.

A close look at the grand compromise of 1976.

How “undue burden”—a concept nurtured by anti-abortion groups and championed by the first woman on the Supreme Court—has eroded the right to choose.

Getting the history of “busing” right enables us to see more clearly how school segregation and educational inequality continued in the decades after Brown.

The untold story of the eradication of the original Ku Klux Klan.

What makes a hero? Why do we remember some stories and not others?

Malcolm X died fifty-one years ago today, just as he was moving toward revolutionary ideas that challenged oppression in all its forms.

FDR cited military necessity as the basis for incarcerating 120,000 Japanese Americans.

The idealistic interpretation of Ellis Island should be revisited.

Dickens, Tocqueville, and the U.N. all agree about this American invention: It’s torture.

The vagrancy law regime regulated so much more than what is generally considered “vagrancy.”

Members of the Ku Klux Klan did not wear their distinctive white uniform until Hollywood—and a mail-order catalog—intervened.

Louis Farrakhan and the Black Lives Matter protests.