Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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A photograph of Josephine Herbst overlaid on a newspaper article she wrote titled "The Soviet in Cuba."

How Josephine Herbst, 'Leading Lady' of the Left, Chronicled the Rise of Fascism

During the interwar years, the American journalist reported on political unrest in Cuba, Germany and Spain.
Althea Gibson leaving tennis court followed by crowd

Sports Legend Althea Gibson Served Up Tennis History When She Broke Through in 1950

Her athletic performance in New York impressed onlookers of all colors and cracked opened the door for a new generation of Black players to come.
A woman drinking out of a mug

Tasting Indian Creek

I lived on Indian Creek with my grandparents after my mother suffered a nervous breakdown.
Book cover of "Living the Dream" by Daniel T. Fleming.

Fighting to Desegregate the American Calendar

As a versatile but complex hero, King led a life open to interpretation by politicians and activists of all types who fiercely debated his legacy.
Illustration of hands signing the fingerspelling alphabet

Unlocking Reason: How the Deaf Created Their Own System of Communication

Exploring Deaf history, language and education as the hearing child of a Deaf adult.
Nellie Bly.

How Nellie Bly and Other Trailblazing Women Wrote Creative Nonfiction Before It Was a Thing

On the early origins of a very American kind of writing.
"The Politics of Safety" book cover

Lawless Law Enforcement

Because of the growth of the Prohibition state, police abuse fomented considerable discussions among police and lawyer associations, criminologists, and others.
Row of suburban homes.

White America Facing Its Ghosts

The slow unraveling of a nation’s suburbs.
The Go-Go's on July 30, 1981. From left, Kathy Valentine, Charlotte Caffey, Jane Wiedlin, Belinda Carlisle, and Gina Schock.

We Got the Beat

How The Go-Go’s emerged from the LA punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album.
Scenes of Stephen Speilburg on set from the filming of Jaws

‘Jaws Became a Living Nightmare’: Steven Spielberg's Ultimate Tell-All Interview

“It was made under the worst of conditions,” the filmmaker reveals in a new book. “People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle.”
The cover of Behold, a Pale Horse by Milton William Cooper.

The Conspiracist Manual That Influenced a Generation of Rappers

How "Behold a Pale Horse" found its way to the Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep’s Prodigy, Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, NAS, and more.
A baby awaiting adoption near Guatemala City.

Guatemala’s Baby Brokers: How Thousands of Children Were Stolen For Adoption

Baby brokers often tricked Indigenous Mayan women into giving up newborns; kidnappers took others. International adoption is now seen as a cover for war crimes.

Dead Kennedys in the West: The Politicized Punks of 1970s San Francisco

The new punk generation made the hippies look past their prime.
Bill Clinton speaking to a crowd.

How the Democrats Ditched Economic Populism for Neoliberalism

On the pro-business transformation of the Democratic Party.
Bank vault.

My Favorite Victorian Criminal Was a Bank Robber With a Secret Weapon

George Leonidas Leslie is still waiting for his HBO series.
Tillie Black Bear and Bill Clinton.

Tillie Black Bear Was the Grandmother of the Anti-Domestic Violence Movement

The Lakota advocate helped thousands of domestic abuse survivors, Native and non-Native alike.
W.E.B. DuBois.

On W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disgraceful Treatment of Gold Star Mothers

The symbolic battles of World War I.
Will Smith as the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Tracing the Evolution of Celebrity Memoirs, from Charles Lindbergh to Will Smith

Creating a personal myth allows celebrities to create just that—a myth.
African American prisoners in Alabama post-Reconstruction.

How the Slavery-Like Conditions of Convict Leasing Flourished After the Collapse of Reconstruction

On the terror that filled the void left by the retreat of federal authority in the South.
A turntable and records.

What’s Old is New Again (and Again): On the Cyclical Nature of Nostalgia

Retro was not the antithesis to the sub- and countercultural experiments of the 1960s, it grew directly out of them.
A drawing of Blanche Chesebrough with her husband standing out of frame, his hand on her shoulder.

Escape From the Gilded Cage

Even if her husband was a murderer, a woman in a bad marriage once had few options. Unless she fled to South Dakota.
Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge.

“One of the Greatest in US History”: The Friendship Between Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge

The relationship between two true believers in American exceptionalism.
Collage of women's profiles, CIA reports, and Osama bin Laden, by Joan Wong.

The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming

Many of the CIA analysts who spotted the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise were female. They had trouble getting their warnings heard.
Jacob Schiff.

Jewish Leaders a Century Ago Had Complicated Feelings About Israel

Fierce disagreements over Zionism have played out from the movement’s inception among Jews, including community leaders who worried it would spark antisemitism.
Willa Cather sitting on a bench, wearing a fur scarf and feathered hat and looking at the camera

Never-Ending Nostalgia: Who and What Inspired Willa Cather

On the early years of America's chronicler of the Great Plains.
Washed-out photo of a man, and redacted book cover of "Born Free and Equal."

Seeing Japanese American Heritage Through Ansel Adams’s Lens

A photographer excavates personal history through reconstruction of Adams's World War II photographs of Japanese Americans.
Sandra Day O'Connor

How the Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Helped Preserve Abortion Rights

When Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, her views on abortion became a source of intense speculation.
Photo of a crowded street in NYC with carts and vendors blocking the roads

How the NYPD Attempted to Navigate Cultural and Linguistic Barriers in the Early 20th Century

One of the biggest challenges for the NYPD, especially in the years following the turn of the twentieth century, was policing the newcomer immigrants.
Photo of a woman surfing

How Men Muscled Women Out of Surfing

Why is surfing still stuck in the 1960s when women have always done it?
A collage of images of Henry Ford and newspaper articles about him.

America’s Most Dangerous Anti-Jewish Propagandist

Making sense of anti-Semitism today requires examining Henry Ford’s outsize part in its origins.
Two American soldiers and farmer Olof Öhman posing with a supposed Viking runestone.

Why Americans Simply Love to Forge Viking Artifacts

No, roving bands of medieval Scandinavians did not visit West Virginia. (So far as we know.)
Cover of book Seeing Red.

The State of Nature

From Jefferson's viewpoint, Native peoples could claim a title to their homelands, but they did not own that land as private property.
A drawing of James Longstreet, zoomed in on his eyes.

The Confederate General Whom All the Other Confederates Hated

James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?
Onions.

A Brief History of Onions in America

On ramps, xonacatl, skunk eggs and more.
Virginia Woolf and others dressed in blackface and Ethiopian clothing.

The Time Virginia Woolf Wore Blackface

Why did future members of the modernist literary movement darken their skin, speak fake Swahili, and board a British battleship?
Swale Land, painting by Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1898, depicting nature.

Vacant Unsettled Lands

American thinkers consider what the already occupied West could fund.
Cover of "Ghostland: An American History," made to look like a cemetery headstone.

The Family That Would Not Live

Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America's haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.
Bison drinking from a pond.

How the Iron Horse Spelled Doom for the American Buffalo

From homesteaders to tourists to the U.S. Army, railroads flooded the Great Plains with people who saw bison as pests, amusements, or opportunities for profit.
A painting of an American landscape with green hills and a river.

The Early Days of American English

How English words evolved on a foreign continent.
Self-Portrait, by Samuel Joseph Brown Jr., a painting of a Black man looking at a portrait of himself.

A Right to Paint Us Whole

W.E.B. Du Bois’ message to African American artists.
Cover of the book "American Purgatory"

American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration

A new book links the rise of American prisons to the expansion of American power around the globe.
Mabel Ping‑Hua Lee holding flowers.

The Revolutionary Chinese Suffragette Who Challenged America’s Politics

The story of Mabel Ping‑Hua Lee.
Civil Rights march for jobs and freedom.

The Hidden Story of Black History and Black Lives Before the Civil Rights Movement

On upending the accepted narrative of the movement.
Close-up of the safety trigger on a handgun

“Come and Take It”: How the Aftermath of Sandy Hook Led to More AR-15s Being Sold Than Ever Before

Chris Waltz was appalled. He felt Democrats were using the Sandy Hook tragedy to tell him he wasn’t responsible enough to own an AR-15.
Recently freed African Americans receive rations.

The Origins of the Socialist Slur

Reconstruction-era opponents of racial equality popularized the charge that protecting civil rights would amount to the end of capitalism.
The American flag on fire.

The Fight for Our America

There have always been two Americas. One based in religious zeal, mythology, and inequality; and one grounded in rule of the people and the pursuit of equality.
Ms. Magazine cover, 1972.

We Are Not Alone: 50 Years of Ms. Magazine

Gloria Steinem on the making of America's first feminist publication.
Front cover of Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling.

Underground Whales: An Energy Archaeology

On the history of whaling and how we understand energy consumption.
Lionel Trilling

Liberalism in Mourning

Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.
Releases of the Republican National Committee’s Press Relations Department, 1939

Possibilities for Propaganda

The founding and funding of conservative media on college campuses in the 1960s.
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