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Collage of Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ted Kennedy on the campaign trail.

The Debate Gaffe That Changed American History

And cost Gerald Ford the presidency.
by Jeff Greenfield via Politico Magazine on May 9, 2024
Hazel Ying Lee (right) and fellow pilot Virginia Wong (left).

This Chinese American Aviatrix Overcame Racism to Fly for the U.S. During World War II

A second-generation immigrant, Hazel Ying Lee was the first Chinese American woman to receive her pilot's license.
by Susan Tate Ankeny via Smithsonian on April 23, 2024
Students in Winnetka, Ill., are checked by a nurses as shown here on return to school following illness. 1947.
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To Address the Teen Mental Health Crisis, Look to School Nurses

For more than a century, school nurses have improved public health in schools and beyond.
by Sherrie Page Guyer via Made by History on May 8, 2024
U.S. Constitution

The President Who Would Not Be King

Executive power and the Constitution.
by Michael W. McConnell via Stanford Lawyer on June 26, 2019
Vice President Joe Biden visits Israel on January 13, 2014.

The Shoah after Gaza

Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built.
by Pankaj Mishra via London Review of Books on March 21, 2024
Alabama Governor George Wallace standing in front of an American map with the words, "Wallace County," written over it.

The Freedom to Dominate

When viewing federal authority as a bulwark for civil rights against local tyranny, we miss what the U.S. government has done to sustain white freedom.
by Erin Pineda via Dissent on January 1, 2024

‘Brown’ at 70

The rhetorically modest but functionally powerful ruling that ended segregation shouldn’t be misused to forestall other efforts at racial equality.
by Randall Kennedy via The American Prospect on May 17, 2024
A drawing of a Wide Awake march.

These Torchlit Young Marchers Helped to Save American Democracy

They called themselves the Wide Awakes. They are a lesson in building a political movement.
by Jon Grinspan via Washington Post on May 14, 2024
Séance with spirit manifestation, 1872, by John Beattie.

Immortalizing Words

Henry James, spiritualism, and the afterlife.
by Ashley C. Barnes via The Hedgehog Review on April 30, 2024
Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruther Bader Ginsburg speaking at the Congrsssional Women's Caucus.

The First and Last of Her Kind

The legal academy has grown dismissive of Justice O’Connor, but the Supreme Court is not a law school faculty workshop. She saw herself as a problem-solver.
by Linda Greenhouse via New York Review of Books on October 17, 2019
Women wearing early twentieth-century gym suits emblazoned with 1902, some women in baskets.

On the Move: How Sports Clothes Became Fashion?

The evolution of women's sportswear.
by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox via Nursing Clio on May 15, 2024

Divestment and the American Political Tradition

From Dow to now.
by Michael Brenes via Warfare And Welfare on May 16, 2024
Two 1950s cars in front of a diner

You Can’t Go Home Again

Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.
by Charlie Tyson via The Hedgehog Review on March 19, 2024
Angela Davis

The AAUP and the Angela Davis Case

Revisiting the AAUP's 1971 UCLA investigation.
by Emily Houh via Academe on April 30, 2024
Black nurses and Sea View Hospital.

The ‘Black Angels’ Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

Professional nurses who moved north during the Great Migration worked in New York City’s most contagious sanatorium — and changed the course of public health.
by Maria Smilios via The Emancipator on May 9, 2024
Sinclair Lewis.

How to Study the “Village Virus”

Sinclair Lewis and the small-town science of yearning.
by Vincent L. Femia via The Metropole on April 3, 2024
A house and people from the American frontier.

The Wild Blood Dynasty

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit.
by Adam Begley via The Atlantic on May 14, 2024
Trump at a rally and newspaper headlines about immigration.

How America Tried and Failed to Stay White

100 years ago the U.S. tried to limit immigration to White Europeans. Instead, diversity triumphed.
by Eduardo Porter via Washington Post on May 15, 2024
A photograph of four children standing, one is slouching.

Are You Sitting Up Straight? America’s Obsession with Improving Posture

In Beth Linker’s new book, she applies a disability studies lens to the history of posture.
by Laura Ansley via Perspectives on History on May 9, 2024
Chinese railroad camp.

Remembering the Forgotten Chinese Railroad Workers

Archaeologists help modern descendants of Chinese railroad workers in Utah commemorate their ancestors' labor and lives.
by Veronica Peterson via Sapiens on August 22, 2019
Picture of the book, "Cracks in the Outfield Wall," by Chris Holaday.

American Legion Baseball, Episode 1

The story of an incident that may have been the first time the issue of race was ever addressed on a baseball field in the Carolinas.
by Chris Holaday via UNC Press Blog on April 25, 2024
A field of cotton.

What a Series of Killings in Rural Georgia Revealed About Early 20th-Century America

On the continuing regime of racial terror in the post-Civil War American South.
by Earl Swift via Literary Hub on April 25, 2024
Stanford Law School.

Why the Right’s Mythical Version of the Past Dominates When It Comes to Legal “History”

They’re invested in legal education, creating an originalist industrial complex with outsize influence.
by Saul Cornell via Slate on May 14, 2024
A billboard next to a road that reads, "Hell is real."

How 19th-Century Spiritualists ‘Canceled’ the Idea of Hell to Address Social and Political Concerns

Spiritualists believed that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey and help those on Earth create a more just world.
by Lindsay DiCuirci via The Conversation on May 8, 2024
Women posing as if drinking from beer bottles.

How Prohibition Forever Changed Women’s Cultural Relationship with Alcohol

On the hostess Langston Hughes called the “Joy Goddess of Harlem.”
by Nicola Nice via Literary Hub on April 24, 2024
Ella Watson in American Gothic, photographed by Gordon Parks.

She Was No ‘Mammy’

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.
by Salamishah Tillet via The Atlantic on May 8, 2024
1957 U.S. Supreme Court Justices
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Super Chief

Reconsidering Earl Warren's place in U.S. history.
by Michael Bobelian via HNN on May 14, 2024
"Temple of Liberty" immigration policy cartoon

How the Federal Government Came to Control Immigration Policy and Why it Matters

The newly empowered federal state created during Reconstruction could restrict immigration much more comprehensively than any state—as Chinese laborers soon discovered.
by Kevin Kenny via The Journal of the Civil War Era on April 2, 2024
Prehistoric people seen through a pair of glasses.

The Abuses of Prehistory

Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors.
by Udi Greenberg via The New Republic on May 10, 2024

Friends and Enemies

Marty Peretz and the travails of American liberalism.
by Jeet Heer via The Nation on May 14, 2024
A JDL ad from the New York Times.

False Prophet

Meir Kahane's Legacy in Israel and America.
by John Ganz via Unpopular Front on May 10, 2024
1880 chart of American political history

Historians and the Strange, Fluid World of 19th-Century Politics

Why our understanding of the era has been hindered by the party system model.
by Rachel Shelden, Erik B. Alexander via Process: A Blog for American History on May 7, 2024
Nell Irvin Painter.

Nell Irvin Painter’s Chronicles of Freedom

A new career-spanning book offers a portrait of Painter’s career as a historian, essayist, and most recently visual artist.
by Elias Rodriques via The Nation on May 7, 2024
Members of the Mason family, St. Inigoes, Maryland, circa 1890–1909.

How Bondage Built the Church

Swarns’s book about a sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is the legacy of resistance.
by Tiya Miles via New York Review of Books on May 2, 2024
Police gather to clear a Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on May 1st.

Anatomy of a Moral Panic

The repressive machine currently arrayed against campus protests follows a familiar pattern.
by Adam Haber, Matylda Figlerowicz via Jewish Currents on May 2, 2024
Groups of workers outside a St. Louis, Missouri factory.

How the Term “Hoosier” Became a Weapon in the Class War

In Indiana, “hoosier” is a badge of honor. In St Louis, it’s the nastiest insult around. The difference reveals the prejudice that breaks worker solidarity.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via Jacobin on May 7, 2024
A drawing of a television screen between the fingers of someone framing an image of barbed wire.

The Problem With TV's New Holocaust Obsession

From 'The Tattooist of Auschwitz' to 'We Were the Lucky Ones,' a new wave of Holocaust dramas feel surprisingly shallow.
by Judy Berman via Time on May 8, 2024
Student protestor holding sign behind campus police officer

Campus Police Are Among the Armed Heavies Cracking Down on Students

While some of the worst behavior has come from local and state police, university police have shown themselves to be just as capable of brutality.
by Alex S. Vitale via The Nation on May 9, 2024
A 1963 photo of Martin Luther King Jr. addressing the thousands of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington.
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Campus Protests Are Called Disruptive. So Was the Civil Rights Movement

Like student protesters today, Martin Luther King Jr. and other 1960s civil rights activists were criticized as disruptive and disorderly.
by Jeanne Theoharis via Made by History on May 9, 2024

Virginia School Board Votes to Restore Names of Confederate Leaders to Schools

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a school board in Virginia stripped the names of Confederate military figures from two schools.
by Daniel Arkin via NBC News on May 9, 2024

Emmett Till Memory Project

The website version of an app designed to be a digital guide to the legacy of Till’s murder.
by Emmett Till Interpretive Center on August 1, 2019
Student protesters at Columbia University in April 1968.

Reviving the Language of Empire

On revisiting the anti-imperialism of the 1960s and ’70s amid the return of left internationalism.
by Aziz Rana, Nora Caplan-Bricker via Jewish Currents on May 9, 2024
Karl I of Austria.

Feeling Blessed

At the Habsburg Convention in Plano.
by Christopher Hooks via The Baffler on May 8, 2024
Pope Francis.

Whatever Happened to the Language of Peace?

Pope Francis is the only world leader who seems prepared to denounce war.
by Sohrab Ahmari via New Statesman on May 8, 2024
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Alt Text

A brief history of the textfile, and the production of conspiracy theories on the internet.
by Walter J. Scheirer via HNN on May 8, 2024
Pro-Israel counterprotesters hold Israeli flags on the edges of a pro-Palestine encampment at Northeastern University in Boston, April 26, 2024.

The New Anti-Antisemitism

The response to college protests against the war on Gaza exemplifies the darkness of the Trumpocene.
by Rick Perlstein via The American Prospect on May 8, 2024
Joe Biden speaking in January.

No, the 2024 Election Won’t Be Anything Like 1968

The election will be a challenge for Joe Biden. But looking to the past won’t help him—or us—understand what lies ahead.
by Walter Shapiro via The New Republic on May 9, 2024
NOLA Resistance Oral History Project title card featuring images of the civil rights movement.

NOLA Resistance Oral History Project

This oral history project records testimony from individuals who were active in the fight for racial equality in New Orleans between 1954 and 1976.
via The Historic New Orleans Collection on June 1, 2020
A drawing that depicts statues of colonial figures on top of pillars.

Messy, Messy Masculinity

The politics of eccentric men in the early United States.
by Ben Bascom via OUPblog on May 27, 2024
Students in a Kent State University classroom.

Decades After Kent State Shooting, the Tragic Legacy Shapes its Activism

The university where 13 student protesters were killed or injured during the Vietnam War era worries that other schools have learned nothing from its history.
by Jonathan Edwards via Washington Post on May 4, 2024
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