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.
Mack Robinson.
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Black Champions: Interview with Mack Robinson

Olympic track and field athlete reflects on the exclusion of African Americans from professional sports and the role his brother Jackie played in changing that.
Jim Brown.
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Black Champions: Interview with Jim Brown

On inclusion of African American athletes in college sports.
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Black Champions: Interview with Curt Flood

On traveling through the Jim Crow south as the sole Black athlete on a baseball team.

The Unacknowledged Lesson: Earl Warren and the Japanese Relocation Controversy

Though best known for his dedication to civil rights as Chief Justice, Earl Warren was a key figure behind Japanese internment in California - and stood by it.
Ticket for Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral service at Morehouse College, April 9, 1968.

The Shot That Echoes Still

James Baldwin's dispatch from MLK's funeral foreshadowed an America we may never escape.
Stokely Carmichael talking to members of the press at the House Rules Committee (1966).

Watching the Watchers

Confessions of an FBI special agent.
A person at a rally

An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis

Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can.
Alcatraz Island prison sign painted over to welcome Indians to Indian land.
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The Art of Stealing Human Rights

Native peoples face similar struggles with the federal governments in the U.S. and in Canada.
Close up of violin
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Who Is the Black Cop?

What is it like to be a Black police officer, and how does the Black community feel about these officers?
Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call For a Poor People’s Campaign

In early 1968, the activist planned a massive protest in the nation’s capital.
Man interviewing a group of people on the street.
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James Baldwin Comments on the Kerner Commission

The Kerner Commission was credited with exposing systemic racism that inspired resistance in Black communities. James Baldwin argued that it stated the obvious.
Martin Luther King Jr. giving a speech.

The Crisis in America’s Cities

Martin Luther King Jr. on what sparked the violent urban riots of the “long hot summer” of 1967.
Black and white photograph of James Baldwin

A Report from Occupied Territory

These things happen, in all our Harlems, every single day. If we ignore this fact, and our common responsibility to change this fact, we are sealing our doom.

The Selma March

On the trail to Montgomery.
Photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking into microphones.

Let Justice Roll Down

"Those who expected a cheap victory in a climate of complacency were shocked into reality by Selma."
Opponents of school desegregation in Montgomery, Alabama.

How Much Had Schools Really Been Desegregated by 1964?

Ten years after 'Brown v. Board of Education', Martin Luther King Jr. condemned how little had changed in the nation's classrooms.
James Baldwin

‘I Can’t Accept Western Values Because They Don’t Accept Me’

Revolution, the civil rights movement, and African-American identity.