Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
New on Bunk
Freed slaves Wilson, Charley, Rebecca, and Rosa, New Orleans, 1864.

The Origins of Birthright Citizenship

The Fourteenth Amendment captures the idea that no people born in the United States should be forced to live in the shadows.
Smudged and revised copy of the Constitution.

The Constitution Is the Crisis

The system is rigged, and it’s the Constitution that’s doing the rigging.
Lindsey R. Peterson.

'Home Builders': Free Labor Households and Settler Colonialism in Western Civil War Commemorations

On the gendered dimensions of trans-Mississippi Civil War memory, the idea of the single-family household, and the politics of expansion and settlement.
Lithograph depicting the Congress of Vienna, 1815.

The Conservative Historian Every Socialist Should Read

A lifetime spent studying the disastrous lead-up to World War I gave Paul Schroeder reason to be horrified at the recklessness of US foreign policy.
Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein at Columbia University

C. Wright Mills, Karl Polanyi, and the Frankfurt School in postwar America.
Belle da Costa Greene at her desk in the Morgan library.

Ambition, Discipline, Nerve

The qualities that enabled Belle da Costa Greene to cross the color line also made her a formidable negotiator and collector for J.P. Morgan’s library.
Ronald Reagan and his mother.

Ronald Reagan’s Guiding Light

Having inherited his mother’s beliefs, Reagan was ever faithful to the Disciples of Christ, whose tenets were often at odds with those of the GOP.
African American baseball team photo.

How Baseball Shaped Black Communities in Reconstruction-Era America

On the early history of Black participation in America's pastime.
Beyonce concert.

Why Beyoncé Is Carving a Route Along the ‘Chitlin' Circuit’

From Jim Crow-era performance to contemporary gospel musicals, entertainers have shaped the Black public sphere.
John C. Calhoun

The Prelude to the Civil War

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”
Two bridges in Grand Island, New York.

Almost Zion: Remembering a Short-lived Jewish State in New York

Ararat, a settlement dreamed up in the 1800s, was meant to offer a refuge to Jews. But after an ornate ceremony, plans never got off the ground.
Person sitting on the ground, head in hands.

Still Pursuing Happiness

The United States fares badly on the World Happiness Report. Who cares?
Collage of magazine text and outdoor images.

The Decline of Outside Magazine Is Also the End of a Vision of the Mountain West

After its purchase by a tech entrepreneur, the publication is now a shadow of itself.

How to Not Get Poisoned in America

"We should go back into history and ask: Why did we need the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906?"
Mark Twain

The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.
National Public Housing Museum

At the National Public Housing Museum, an Embattled Idea Finds a Home

Chicago’s latest museum looks to change the narrative around the federally supported housing projects that US cities turned their backs on decades ago.
Texas Southern University marching band.

The Storied History of HBCU Marching Bands

Marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities can be seen as both celebratory emblems and complicated arbiters of Black American culture.
John F. Kennedy and George McGovern discuss Food for Peace.
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How Foreign Aid Can Benefit Both the U.S. and the World

Food for Peace exemplifies the value of internationalism and humanitarian endeavors in American foreign policy.
Henry Carey
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The 19th Century Thinker Who Touted Tariffs

Trump is not alone in his support for tariffs. Henry Carey also believed tariffs could help American workers.
Painting of a person doing arithemetic.
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Solve for AI

What the history of the pocket calculator reveals about the future of AI in classrooms.
The words "the world you were born in no longer exists" covering Trump's eyes.

The Present Crisis and the End of the Long '90s

On the constitutional settlement that governed America from the end of the Volcker Shock in 1982 to the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024.
American soldiers in Vietnam.

If You’ve Watched Ken Burns’ Vietnam Documentary, Do You Need Netflix’s?

I, a historian of the Vietnam War, have watched the Turning Point treatment. I have some notes.
Alleged enemy aliens on way to detention camp, Gloucester, New Jersey, 1918.

The Alien Enemies Act: Annotated

Confused about the oft-mentioned Alien Enemies Act? This explainer, with links to free peer-reviewed scholarship, may help clear things up.
Gothic cathedral

On What Americans Know About Medieval History

A public opinion poll suggests that people really have strong opinions about a period that they don't really know anything about.
Science fiction landscape.

75 Years Ago, "The Martian Chronicles" Legitimized Science Fiction

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.

A Chorus of Defiance

Fifty years after the Vietnam War’s end, lessons from the peace movement on mobilizing resistance.
Clark Mills’s statue of Andrew Jackson, Lafayette Park, Washington D.C., circa 1910–1925

Vance’s Junk History

When Donald Trump and his followers go in search of historical forerunners to justify their regime, they turn with striking regularity to the presidency.
Helicopter, soldiers, and civilians at the fall of Saigon.
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How We Oversimplified the History of the Vietnam War

Popular memory of the war in both the U.S. and Vietnam tends to cast the fall of Saigon as inevitable.
Diagram of a movement experiment studying abnormalities in walking

The Making of the American Culture of Work

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media.
Garment workers use sewing machines at a textile facility in New York City in 1975.

Tariffs and the Shop Floor

A former garment worker reflects on rank-and-file agitation in the US garment industry just before the industry fled the country.
Chief Justices of the Supreme Court attend President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on March 4, 2025, in Washington, DC.

The Courts Won’t Save Us

Rather than resisting authoritarianism, the courts have enabled Trump’s rise.

From Chinese Exclusion to Pro-Palestinian Activism: The History of Politically Motivated Deportation

Removal orders targeting student activists echo America’s long past of jailing and expelling immigrants because of their race, or what they say or believe.
Glass etching superimposed on park landscape to visualize where buildings were.

America’s Forgotten Capital City

At Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texans flex their go-it-alone style.
Collage of the Battles of Lexington and Concord and patriotic imagery.

Revolution and Progress on Lexington Green

The American Revolution’s first battle is a reminder that liberty isn't the result of inevitable progress but a prize won by those willing to fight for it.
Collage of school children, church windows, and a map of Oklahoma territory.

Oklahoma Is Asking the Supreme Court to Ignore History

The Founders had disagreements about the role of religion in America’s public schools, but there was always one line they would not cross.
Two Vietnamese women mourn their relatives on April 29, 1975, at Bien Hoa military cemetery.

US Defeat in Vietnam Was the Right Outcome for an Unjust War

The US invasion of Vietnam was catastrophic for the Vietnamese people, resulting in millions of deaths. Fifty years ago, the US-backed regime finally collapsed.
Illustration of characters from "The Great Gatsby."

How “The Great Gatsby” Took Over High School

The classroom staple turns a hundred.

Milk Country

The making of Vermont's landscape.
Lethal injection table.
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Lethal Injection Is Not Based on Science

The history of the three-drug combo used in death-penalty executions. 
A painting of Marie-Louise Coidavid.
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The First and Last Queen of Haiti in Exile

Queen Marie-Louise outlived most of her family, yet her story about the revolution and its aftermath was rarely consulted by those writing the era’s history.
Rachel Cockerell’s “Melting Point" tells the story of an exiled people and their effort to find a place to call home.

When Jews Sought the Promised Land in Texas

While some Jewish exiles dreamed of a homeland in Palestine, the Jewish Territorial Organization fixed its hopes on Galveston.
Cover of "America, América" by Greg Grandin.

The Dialectic Lurking Behind the Brutality

Greg Grandin’s new book tells the story of US expansionism and its complex relationship with the rest of the New World.
Fiorello La Guardia.

How Mayor Fiorello La Guardia Transformed New York City

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is questioning what a socialist might accomplish as mayor of NYC. To answer it, it’s worth looking back on Fiorello La Guardia.
Mary MacLane.

“I Am Making the World My Confessor”: Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte

In 1902, a woman named Mary MacLane from Butte, Montana, became an international sensation after publishing a scandalous journal at the age of 19.
A political cartoon of Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland emptying the U.S. treasury.

Radical Tariffs Aren’t New, But They Have Been Disastrous

An American story.
George W. Bush delivering a speech.

George W. Bush Lives on in Donald Trump’s Migrant Policies

The “war on terror” led to a sweeping curtailment of immigrants’ rights that swept up green card holders as well as citizens.
Supreme court passing from the robing room to the court chambers, 1881.
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Lacking a Demonstrable Source of Authority

On the case that provoked the courts to decide if the federal government had jurisdiction to exercise American criminal law over Native peoples on Native lands.
Sam Francis

He’s a Key Thinker of the Radical Right, But Is He All That?

Where the rediscovery of Sam Francis goes wrong.
Francis Townsend
partner

Creating the “Senior Citizen” Political Identity

On the movement that fought for old-age pensions during the Great Depression.
Chinese migrants wrapped in blankets on a beach, from the cover of "Camp of the Saints."
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Mutant Capitalism

How the dystopian visions of the nativist right are in keeping with a long tradition of neoliberal ideology.
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