Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (left), "Empire's Mistress" book cover with image of Isabel Cooper (right)

The General, the Mistress, and the Love Stories That Blind Us

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez discusses her new book on Isabel Cooper, a Filipina American actress and Douglas MacArthur’s lover.
An engraving of a boat in the water.

"Interior" by Design

Despite the Interior Department’s name, the agency has played a key role in the construction of American foreign policy and territorial expansion.
Mark Rudd addresses students as president of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society on May 3, 1968.

Mark Rudd’s Lessons From SDS and the Weather Underground for Today’s Radicals

The famous activist reflects on what radicals like him got right and got wrong, and what today’s socialists should learn from his experiences.
Daryl Michael Scott.

"Bad History and Worse Social Science Have Replaced Truth"

Daryl Michael Scott on propaganda and myth from ‘The 1619 Project’ to Trumpism.
An illustration of two men in 1770s clothing fighting in a river.

Has the World Gone Mad? An Interview with Sarah Swedberg

Swedberg's new book shows how prevalent concerns about mental illness were to the people of the early American republic.
Robin D.G. Kelley

The Future of L.A. Is Here

On L.A. solidarity and the Black radical tradition.
Postcard depicting the Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh

The Rise of Healthcare in Steel City

On deindustrialization, the care economy, and the living legacies of the industrial workers’ movement.
Tyler Stovall and his book

The History of Freedom Is a History of Whiteness

A conversation about whether or not the legacy of liberty can break away from racial exclusion and domination.
Elizabeth Catte and her book

'Pure America': Eugenics Past and Present

Historian Elizabeth Catte traces the history and influence of eugenics from her backyard across the country.
Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth Keckley over a map of Washington DC.

How Black Women Brought Liberty to Washington in the 1800s

A new book shows us the capital region's earliest years through the eyes and the experiences of leaders like Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth Keckley.
Collage of children in school and historic and patriotic images.

Amid the Online Glut of Facts and Fake News, We’re Teaching History Wrong

This is even trickier now that the language of critical thinking has been appropriated by the alt-right.
"We the People"; US Constitution

It Would Be Great if the United States Were Actually a Democracy

The pervasive mythmaking about the supposed wisdom of the founders has covered up a central truth: the US Constitution is an antidemocratic mess.
Rush Limbaugh at a Trump rally

From Limbaugh to Trump: A Historian of the Right Wing Explains Rush’s Real Legacy

In so many ways, Limbaugh helped sow the seeds of the pathologies we're now living through.
John Rawls

How John Rawls Became the Liberal Philosopher of a Conservative Age

With "A Theory Of Justice," Rawls became the most influential political philosopher of his time — just as the liberal agenda he supported was retreating.
photograph of a woman from a carpeta

A New Photo Exhibit Looks at Decades of FBI Surveillance on American Citizens

A new book shares a cautionary tale of the American surveillance state.
Go on Monopoly board

The Twisted History of Your Favorite Board Game

An interview with Mary Pilon about her new book, ‘The Monopolists,’ which uncovers the real story about how Monopoly became the game it is today.
Harry S. Truman holding up a newspaper with the erroneous headline "Dewey Defeats Truman"

Why Americans Will Never Turn Against Polling

Failures inspire distrust of pollsters and calls for more shoe-leather reporting. But by the next election, we always come running back.
Jill Lepore and the cover of her Book "If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future"

“We Don’t Want the Program”: On How Tech Can’t Fix Democracy

“Start-ups: they need philosophers, political theorists, historians, poets. Critics.”
Illustration of six books on the topic of pandemics

COVID-19 and the Outbreak Narrative

Outbreak narratives from past diseases can be influential in the way we think about the COVID pandemic.
Book cover for The Two Faces of American Freedom

The Two Faces of American Freedom, Ten Years Later: Part One

On the ten year anniversary of Aziz Rana's book, Henry Brooks interviews him on his influential book and what it might teach us about the legacies of populism.
Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill

What We Still Get Wrong About Alexander Hamilton

Far from a partisan for free markets, the Founding Father insisted on the need for economic planning. We need more of that vision today.
Wilmington coup marker

We’ve Had a White Supremacist Coup Before. History Buried It.

The 1898 Wilmington insurrection showed “how people could get murdered in the streets and no one held accountable for it.”
Headshot of Angie Maxwell.

Political Scientist Angie Maxwell on Countering the 'Long Southern Strategy'

For decades, the Republican Party has used what's known as "the Southern Strategy" to win white support in the region.
A custodian moving furniture in the Capitol building.

The 'Racial Caste System' at the U.S. Capitol

After the Capitol was cleared of insurrectionists on January 6, it wasn't lost on many that cleaning up the mess would fall largely to Black and Brown people.
A crowd of people with one person waving the Confederate flag

Learning from the Failure of Reconstruction

The storming of the Capitol was an expression of the antidemocratic strands in American history.
Cover of "The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s"

In Search of Soul

A musicological conversation about the history and social value of Black music.
Drawing of Lincoln with his hand on a Bible during a swearing-in with two other people

The Presidential Transition That Shattered America

A Trump-Biden transition is sure to be scary. But it’d be hard to beat Buchanan-Lincoln.

In 19th-Century America, Fighting Disease Meant Battling Bad Smells

The history of unpleasant odor, or miasma, has unexpected relevance in the time of COVID-19.

A Historian of Economic Crisis on the World After COVID-19

A leading expert on financial crises explains how the pandemic is upending economic orthodoxy and raising the stakes of the 2020 election.

Why Do American Presidential Transitions Take Such a Ridiculously Long Time?

Horseback travel time is only part of the story.
Motorcycle vest embroidered with the words "Sagebrush Rebel."

Legacies of the Sagebrush Rebellion

A conversation about the roots of organized resistance to federal regulation of public lands in the American West.
Cover image of "Freedom an Unruly History"

What We Call Freedom Has Never Been About Being Free

The modern conception of freedom emerged as an antidemocratic reaction by elites who wanted to curtail state power.
“The Unrestricted Dumping-Ground” by Louis Dalrymple, published in Judge, Vol. 44-45 (1903).

A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States

On the passage and enforcement of laws to exclude or deport immigrants for their beliefs, and the people who challenged those laws.
A car being made in a car factory

Talking About Auto Work Means Talking About Constant, Brutal Violence

It's remembered as one of the best industrial jobs a worker could get in postwar America. Less remembered is how brutal life on the factory floor was – and still is.
President Trump in car

Trump’s Illness and the History of Presidential Health

Are White House doctors keeping the public adequately informed about President Trump’s battle with COVID-19?

QAnon Didn't Just Spring Forth From the Void

Calling QAnon a "cult" or "religion" hides how its practices are born of deeply American social and political traditions.
Bill of Mortality from the plague, and New York Times list of Covid deaths.

When 194,000 Deaths Doesn’t Sound Like So Many

From plague times to the coronavirus, the history of our flawed ability to process mass casualty events.
William Lloyd Garrison

The Country That Was Built to Fall Apart

Why secession, separatism, and disunion are the most American of values.
partner

“I Wanted to Tell the Story of How I Had Become a Racist”

An interview with historian Charles B. Dew.

John Muir and Race

Environmental historian Donald E. Worster pushes back against recent characterizations of Muir as a racist.

How to Confront a Racist National History

Susan Neiman, a philosopher who studies Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi past, examines how the United States can remember slavery and segregation.

The Real Story Behind “Because of Sex”

One of the most powerful phrases in the Civil Rights Act is often viewed as a malicious joke that backfired. But its entrance into law was far more savvy.

Bryan Stevenson Explains How It Feels To Grow Up Black Amid Confederate Monuments

"I think we have to increase our shame — and I don't think shame is a bad thing."

How Today’s Protests Compare to 1968, Explained by a Historian

Heather Ann Thompson explains what’s changed and what has stayed the same.

Alternate Histories

A conversation with John Nichols about the night in 1944 that altered the trajectory of the Democratic Party.

How Historic Preservation Shaped the Early United States

A new book details how the young nation regarded its recent and more ancient pasts.

When Did Cheap Meat Become an “Essential” American Value?

Keeping meat production moving during the pandemic is dangerous. But history shows that there’s little Americans won’t sacrifice for a cheap steak.

A Motley Crew for our Times?

A conversation with historian Marcus Rediker about multiracial mobs, history from below and the memory of struggle.

How Racism Is Shaping the Coronavirus Pandemic

For hundreds of years, false theories of “innate difference and deficit in black bodies” have shaped American responses to disease.
African American men in jail.

“We Were Called Comrades Without Condescension or Patronage”

In the Jim Crow South, the Alabama Communist Party distinguished itself as a champion of racial and economic justice.
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