May Day's Radical History

The date of Occupy's strike has ties to the eight-hour day movement, immigrant workers and American anarchism.

Battleground America

One nation, under the gun.
Angela Davis.

An Angela Davis Interview

On revolution and violence.

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

March of the Bonus Army

In 1932, twenty-thousand unemployed WWI veterans descended on Washington, DC to demand better treatment from the federal government.
John Ridge

Cherokee Slaveholders and Radical Abolitionists

An unlikely alliance in antebellum America.

Objection

Clarence Darrow’s unfinished work.

How The 'Pox' Epidemic Changed Vaccination Rules

During the 1898-1904 pox epidemic, public health officials and policemen forced thousands of Americans to be vaccinated against their will.
Lithograph of the 1871 massacre of Chinese workers in California.

How Los Angeles Covered Up the Massacre of 17 Chinese

The greatest unsolved murders in Los Angeles' history, bloodier than the Black Dahlia, more vicious than the hit on Bugsy Siegel, occurred on a night in 1871.

On the Death Sentence

David Garland makes a powerful argument that will persuade many readers that the death penalty is unwise and unjustified.

Restarting the Civil Rights Movement

Is there still a civil rights movement?

Their Own Talking

Reconsidering Septima Clark’s life challenges many of our ideas about the Civil Rights Movement and women's roles in it.
Black marchers picket in front of the White House to ask FDR to free the Scottsboro boys.

How 'Communism' Brought Racial Equality to the South

The Communist Party fought for racial equality in the South, specifically Alabama, where segregation was most oppressive.
Armed miners at the military headquarters of the United Mine Workers, in Trinidad, Colorado, the month of the Ludlow massacre.

There Was Blood

The Ludlow massacre revisited.
Los Angeles Times building, after being bombed on October 1, 1910

How They Blew Up the L.A. Times

During the half-century between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, class warfare in the United States was always robust, usually ferocious, and often homicidal.
Black residents viewing the remains of their burned homes after rioting.

The Day Lincoln's Hometown Erupted In Racial Hate

A century ago, Springfield, Illinois, descended into a two-day spasm of racial violence and mayhem that still has the power to shock.

Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller

Was the 2008 Heller decision a victory for originalism or a living Constitution?

Mohawks, Mohocks, Hawkubites, Whatever

Down and dirty in eighteenth-century London and Boston.

Don’t Despair About the Supreme Court

In 2005, Howard Zinn explained why it was naive to depend on the Court to defend the rights of marginalized Americans.

Supreme Court Cronyism

With the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, George W. Bush restarts a long and troubled tradition.
View of Boston in 1730.

Civil Unions in the City on a Hill: The Real Legacy of "Boston Judges"

For the English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.

Bringing Rapes to Court

How sexual assault victims in colonial America navigated a legal system that was enormously stacked against them.
Caricature of Martin Luther King's head

The House of the Prophet

Martin Luther King Jr. was the galvanizing voice of the civil rights struggle, an uncompromising, complicated figure who soared in the pulpit.
Ted Kaczynski being led by two law enforcement officers.

Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber

Purposely brutalizing psychological experiments may have confirmed Theodore Kaczynski’s still-forming belief in the evil of science while he was in college.
Caricature drawing of Charles Black

Pursuing the Pursuit of Happiness

Traditional Supreme Court precedent may depend too much on substantive due process to safeguard human rights.
Cover of "Making Whiteness," featuring a Black man in front of a billboard of larger-than-life white faces.
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Making Whiteness

How a historian's family history informed her professional quest to unpack the stories white Southerners told about themselves.

Abortion in American History

How do ideological debates on gender roles influence the abortion debate?

To Keep and Bear Arms

A challenge to the "Standard Model" scholars who hold that the Second Amendment protects individual gun rights.
Black and white divided star on the cover of "Two Nations" by Andrew Hacker.

The American Dilemma

The moral contradiction of a nation torn between allegiance to its highest ideals and awareness of the base realities of racial discrimination.
Lee Elder
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Black Champions: Interview with Lee Elder

His experiences with racism and golf, from death threats in Memphis to breaking the sporting color barrier in South Africa.