Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
New on Bunk
The word "no" engraved in the Gorton font on different materials.

The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan

A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
Mary Beth Tinker and her mother.
partner

How Tinker v. Des Moines Established Students’ Free Speech Rights

“The lesson of the Tinker case is: Speak up. Stand up,” Mary Beth Tinker told us.
Front cover of the 1940 issue Anvil by John C. Rogers showing a muscular man in bold red strokes.

Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism

Anvil's popular vision for a multiracial socialism in the heart of the US could hardly be more urgent today.
1800s lithograph by George du Maurier showing a chair dance in an art studio.

Done in by Time

A review of Edwin Frank's short list of great 20th century novels.
Constitution mural in the Capitol rotunda.

James Madison and the Crisis of the New Order

The effort to return American government to republican principles is daunting—but the Founders’ wisdom can serve as a guide.
A young boy peers out from a hole in a fence as his friends play basketball in a court where police officers are gathering for a patrol.

How White-Collar Criminals Plundered a Brooklyn Neighborhood

How East New York was ransacked by the real estate industry and abandoned by the city in the process.
Harry Bridges surrounded by a group of men.

Before Mahmoud Khalil, There Was Harry Bridges

The U.S. government repeatedly tried to deport the midcentury labor leader over his alleged ties to the Communist Party.
Patrick Henry

Did Patrick Henry Really Say ‘Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death’?

The Virginia delegate may have spoken those words on March 23, 1775, but some historians doubt it.
KKK members parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1925.

When the KKK Came to D.C.

Revisiting a 1925 march through the eyes of Black newspapers.
Drawing of the fight between two congressional representatives titled "Congressional pugilists," 1798.

Alien Enemies, Alien Friends, and the Concept of “Allegiance”

With controversy raging over the Alien Enemies Act, how should we understand the concept it invoked?
Frank Wisner's photo covered with official seals.

The Making of a Cold War Spy

The life and work of Frank Wisner, one of the CIA’s founding officers, offers us a portrait of American intelligence’s excesses.
Aerial view of big buildings, wide roads, open parking lots, and affordable housing from "Project One" in Newport, Virginia.

Urban Renewal in Virginia

Urban landscapes and communities all across the state of Virginia still bear the scars of urban renewal.
National Bureau of Economic Research logo.

Her Property Transactions: White Women and the Frequency of Female Ownership in the Antebellum Era

White women were especially likely to be owners involved in transactions with enslaved women, where they were listed as owners in nearly 40% of transactions.
CIA memo about LSD use.

CIA Behavior Control Experiments Focus of New Scholarly Collection

Agency sought drugs and behavior control techniques to use in “special interrogations” and offensive operations.
Graydon Carter sitting next to stacks of ornate, empty chairs.

Vanity Fair’s Heyday

I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what?
NAACP Legal Defense Fund button against lynching.

“Lynch Law in America”: Annotated

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose January 1900 essay exposed the racist reasons given by mobs for their crimes, argued that lynch law was an American shame.
Flags of Native American tribes at Omaha Beach memorial.

No, Native American Citizenship Does Not Support Limits on Birthright Citizenship

This defense misconstrues both the Constitution and the Supreme Court decisions relying on it.

The Sum of Our Wisdom

We are told that we are a Calvinist culture, which means very little, and none of that good.
Elon Musk, David Stockman, and a federal building.

The Education of Elon Musk

The Reagan administration offers a cautionary tale about cost-cutting zeal crashing up against the reality of how government works.
The Crystals, a Black girl-group, performing at a high school prom.

The Kansas City School That Became a Stop for R. & B. Performers

In the nineteen-sixties, artists such as Bo Diddley and the Ike & Tina Turner Revue played the prom at Pembroke-Country Day.

The US Used the Alien Enemies Act to Detain Their Families. Now, They are Watching History Repeat

During World War II, the law justified the imprisonment of thousands like Heidi Gurcke Donald.
A padlock around the Pentagon.

The Left-Wing Origins of ‘Deep State’ Theory

Those who wish to restore democratic rule, regardless of political orientation, must take it seriously.

How Business Metrics Broke the University

The push to make students into customers incentivizes faculty to seek visibility through controversy rather than through traditional scholarly achievement.
Black and white photograph of a lake.

Not So Close

For Henry David Thoreau, it is only as strangers that we can see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are.
Robert Frost.

Chapters and Verse

Looking for the poet between the lines.
Thousands of shipping containers at the terminal at Port Elizabeth, New Jersey.

No Tariffs Without Representation

Executive trade power has gone too far.
A portrait of Edgar Allen Poe.

The Most Overrated Writer in America

Do people really like Edgar Allen Poe?
Three members of the Wages for Housework campaign running a table and handing out pamphlets.

Home Is Where the Unpaid Labor Is

A new history traces the development and influence of the global Wages for Housework movement from its founding to present day.
Demonstrator with a sign advocating the release of Mahmoud Khalil.

Trump’s Deportations Are a Throwback to Red Scare Politics

The long tradition of the US government using border policy as a tool for political control, stretching back to Red Scare efforts to suppress left-wing dissent.
Donald Trump at a formal event.

Trump’s Imperial Fantasy: To Be Polk, McKinley, and Putin—All at Once

Trampling rights, imposing tariffs, gobbling up others’ territories. Trump is imitating his role models to a T.
University of Berlin, Germany, circa 1900

Academic Freedom’s Origin Story

While academic freedom is foundational to American higher education today, it is a relatively recent development.
Arrested demonstrators of the University of California Free Speech Movement during their trial in Berkeley, California, 1965.

America Needs a New Free Speech Movement

Donald Trump is showing us what an unaccountable class of corporate decision-makers looks like—and it looks like a lot of fear, and a terrible loss of freedom.
A UC Berkeley student picket supports a strike protesting demonstrators’ arrests, 1964.
partner

Whose Side Are College Administrators On?

There’s a long history of politicians targeting student protesters — and of campus leaders abetting those efforts.
Members of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Daughters of Union Veterans gather in Colorado in the 1930s.

Veterans Visit an Idealized West

A gathering of Union veterans in 1883 sheds light on the country's vision of the American West—as a space for reconciliation and a prize won by the war.
Left: William F. Buckley; right: Donald Trump.

The Modern Conservative Tradition and the Origins of Trumpism

Today’s Trumpist radicals are not (small-c) conservatives – but they stand in the continuity of Modern Conservatism’s defining political project.
The L.A. Eight, in 1987.

The Last Time Pro-Palestinian Activists Faced Deportation

Mahmoud Khalil’s case is eerily similar to that of the L.A. Eight when students were targeted not because of any criminal activity but because of their speech.
Pluto, July 2015, photographed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.

In Search of Planet X

The books examine the history of space exploration, from the race to discover Pluto to the idea of space colonization.
A man putting a ballot into a ballot box during a 1938 Arkansas ballot referendum.

How to Change Policy Without Politicians

As Arkansas politics becomes more conservative, voters are using the ballot for progressive ends.
A “mosser” with a load of seaweed bound for the agar factory in Beaufort, N.C.

When Fishermen Harvested Seaweed: The Agar Industry in Beaufort, N.C. during the Second World War

How a small factory off the coast of North Carolina played a role in the war.
A flooded road.

Jamestown Is Sinking

In the Tidewater region of Virginia, history is slipping beneath the waves. In the Anthropocene, a complicated past is vanishing.
Gov. Ronald Reagan confronted student protesters in Sacramento weeks before dismissing “intellectual luxuries.”

The Day the Purpose of College Changed

After February 28, 1967, the main reason to go was to get a job.
Irish immigrants at Ellis Island.

Why Irish America Is Not Evergreen

Changes to US immigration rules have largely closed the door to new entries, leading inexorably to a “graying” of Irish America.
Robert Frost.

The Many Guises of Robert Frost

Sometimes seen as the stuff of commencement addresses, his poems are hard to pin down—just like the man behind them.
Book cover of "Squanto: A Native Odyssey" by Andrew Lipman.

Squanto: A Native Odyssey

A new biography tells a far more complex, nuanced, and, frankly, interesting historical episode than that depicted in the typical grade-school pageant.
Photo of Jimmy Carter.

Carter and Chile: How Humanitarian was the President?

The 'human rights president' had some tough political decisions to make regarding Augusto Pinochet in 1979.
A protester holds their hands up in front of a police car in Ferguson, Missouri, on November 25, 2014.

How Being “Woke” Lost Its Meaning

How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war.
Martin Galvin, of Noraid, standing in front of a crowd of protesting supporters, holding a copy of "The Irish People" newspaper with the headline "Martin Galvin safe after building capture."

There’s a Hidden History of US Support for Irish Republicans

The solidarity group Noraid raised millions of dollars to support the Irish republican movement during the Troubles.
Slave auction in the United States.

How a Group of 19th-Century Historians Helped Relativize the Violent Legacy of Slavery

On the scholarship and intellectual legacies of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, William Dunning and other academics.
Working-class Irish family.

What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly

The Great Hunger was a modern event, shaped by the belief that the poor are the authors of their own misery and that the market must be obeyed at all costs.
Engraving by Samuel de Champlain of himself and his Algonquin allies attacking the Iroquois.

An Expanding Vision of America

Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.
Filter by:

Categories

Select content type

Time