Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
New on Bunk
Jesus Jones on stage.

Right Here, Right Now: Jesus Jones and the Post-Cold War Moment

For a brief window at the end of the Cold War, British alt-rock band Jesus Jones tapped into global feelings of optimism and hope.
National Archives building.
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Scratching the Record

On the long history of governments attempting to restrict access to documents about their inner workings.
Coastal telegraph semaphore tower, 1799.

The Secret Signal

The semaphore towers of the Hudson.
A snowcapped mountain surrounded by forest reflects in a lake at North Cascades National Park.

Remembering What the Parks Forgot

On memory, erasure, and the return of indigenous presence.
Painting of enslaved people waiting to be sold.

Enslaved Women’s Resistance to Slavery and Gendered Violence

A new book offers a fresh perspective on the resistance of enslaved women and their interactions with the law.
Toni Morrison holding a manuscript.

She Was the Greatest Author of Her Generation. She Should Be Remembered for More Than Her Writing.

Toni Morrison was an editor for 12 years, even as she wrote her own masterpieces. I spoke to her authors about being edited by an icon.
African American workers march past a line of National Guards troops with bayonets fixed.

The National Guard’s History of Violent Labor Repression

Donald Trump recently deployed California’s National Guard to repress protests in LA. The National Guard has a long history of breaking up protests and strikes.
A throng of Trump supporters, some in colonial garb, march through Washington D.C.

The 19th-Century Precursors to the Crises of Trump’s America

Revisiting history shows that violence and constitutional disputes are nothing new in US politics.
Fabric with stars on one side and George Washington on the other.

The ‘Dirty and Nasty People’ Who Became Americans

How 13 colonies came together.
Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Kristi Noem, look at rows of bunk beds behind chain link fence in a detention center.

Don’t Call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Call it a Concentration Camp.

This facility’s purpose fits the classic model, and its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.
Lionel Trilling photographed by Walker Evans in the 1950s.

Colony, Aviary and Zoo: New York Intellectuals

A new book examines the aggressive masculinity that the editors of the Partisan Review brought to their art and literary criticism.
Aged typed copy of the Declaration of Independence.

The Biggest Coverup of the American Revolution

The Declaration of Independence condemns King George III. But the British were not to blame for one of the war’s most infamous conflagrations.

Gimme Boer

The recent resettlement of a few dozen Afrikaner “refugees” points to a longer history of U.S. fascination with these Dutch-descended white South Africans.
Phineas Gage.

How the ‘Myth of Phineas Gage’ Affects Brain Injury Survivors

Why does the diagnosis of Gage social ‘disinhibition’ lean so heavily on flimsy documentation about Gage, while overlooking the case of Eadweard Muybridge?
A group of workers in hard hats walk through the shallow water of one of the Panama Canal's locks.

‘The Canal Is Ours’

Trump’s threats to take control of the Panama Canal have precipitated a struggle over the country’s sovereignty.
Document about enslaved baby born to Priscilla.

Active Silence, Archival Presence, and An Enslaved Mother's Legal Knowledge

An enslaved woman’s refusal to name her child challenged Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition laws and left behind a rare archival trace of resistance.
Engraving of Founding Fathers reading the Declaration of Independence while onlookers rally.

Does America Have a Founding Philosophy?

It depends on how you read the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths.
Abandoned church in Coaldale, Pennsylvania, with an American flag hanging upside down over its door.

The Decline and Fall of Christianity in America

If we imagine religion as a technology, argues Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, we can better see the cause of its decline: obsolescence.
Illustration of armed and hooded Ku Klux Klan members.

Masked Terror

ICE officers are wearing masks to conceal their identities. The Ku Klux Klan also employed masks to avoid prosecution for its acts of racial violence.
Collage of gay film covers

Good Queers and Bad Queers

Myths are fed back as stereotypes and strawmen to divine some boundary for acceptability.
Hiram Revels.

Birthright Citizenship and Reconstruction’s Unfinished Revolution

The idea that birth on U.S. soil confers citizenship has remained both foundational and contested.
Declaration of Independence marked up with red marker.

Here Are the Declaration of Independence’s Grievances Against King George III. Many Apply to Trump.

It’s uncanny.
Jimmy Swaggart

How Jimmy Swaggart Changed American Christianity

The disgraced televangelist built his career on an undeniable talent. His downfall contributed to a major shift in how Americans viewed religious leaders.
Knight on horseback fights a dragon.

The Georgist Roots of American Libertarianism

How did libertarians come to embrace Henry George, a thinker championed by political coalitions ranging from early zionists to the global Green Party?
President Gerald R. Ford and the Shah of Iran confer over a map in 1975.

History of Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Detailed in New Collection

U.S.-Iran diplomacy, intelligence on South Korea's nuclear program, and fears that a reactor given to India would become a “do-it-yourself bomb kit.”
Waves crashing onto the sidewalk during a King Tide in San Diego.

Property and Permanence on the California Coastline

California has long allowed an ambiguous boundary between public and private land along its coast. Climate change is testing the limits of this compromise.
Kurt Vonnegut portrait composed of dots.

The Making of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Cat’s Cradle’

How the novelist turned the violence and randomness of war into a cosmic joke.
Movie poster for Warfare, 2025.
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War Stories Without the History

Films about the Iraq War prize “truth-telling,” but don’t offer many insights about the war itself.
45 rpm records of Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces" and "Crazy."

I Fall to Pieces

The author of "Homeplace" shares a note from Patsy Cline.
The first Congress in prayer.

The Bible in Revolutionary America

While Enlightenment philosophy may have influenced the wealthy Revolutionary elites, it was the Biblical worldview that prompted widespread resistance.
Demonstrators against ICE in Pasadena, California.

Emma Tenayuca Championed Class Struggle and Migrant Rights

Labor activist Emma Tenayuca led Mexican American women in San Antonio’s legendary pecan shellers’ strike. Today, we can learn from her example.
Drag ball performer Venus Xtravaganza in 1986.

The Enduring Legacy of ’80s Harlem Drag Balls

More than three decades since "Paris Is Burning" put the underground scene on a world stage, ball culture remains a haven for the queer community.
Donald Trump shakes the hand of a border patrol officer while a line of others waits to meet him.

State of Exception

National security governance, then and now.
Pages from Eve Adams' Polish passport.

Deported From the U.S. for Publishing 'Lesbian Love,' She Was Later Killed by Nazis

Eve Adams was imprisoned for disorderly conduct and obscenity, then sent back to Europe, where she became a target of the Holocaust.
Confederate Commander Col. Lawrence Allen and his wife.

The Massacre Men

The Confederacy often used brutal tactics against Union sympathizers, even in Southern towns.
Edward Abbey stands in the desert.

Edward Abbey’s FBI File

"If the times have changed, Abbey’s ideas about freedom have in some ways never been more relevant."
Cover of "Write Like a Man," featuring a cartoon of Jewish New Yorkers around a table of Manhattan locations.
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A Case of Unrequited Love

On Irving Howe and the New Left.
“Authority of Law” statue by James Earle Frasier in front of the United States Supreme Court building.

Which History in Obergefell v. Hodges?

The Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage by framing it as a historical evolution of liberty, dignity, and equality under the Constitution.
A row of California National Guardsmen stand atop a top step in riot gear.

Trump’s Deportation Frenzy Echoes the Fugitive Slave Hunts of the 1850s

Trump's crackdown on immigrants bears alarming parallels to the fugitive slave obsessions of the pre-Civil War South.
The 59th Street electric powerhouse, New York City, 1904.

The Utility of Utilities

Climate activists are no fans of electric utilities. But the alternatives that they often prefer will not deliver infrastructural change at the scale we need.
World War 2 era military helmet under text reading "He's sure to get 'V' mail."

V-Mail: A Photo-Based Technological Triumph in Wartime Communication

During World War II, the revolutionary V-Mail leveraged cutting-edge microfilm technology to streamline correspondence.
Promotional flyer for Zorita’s 1949 film, I Married a Savage, ca. 1949. In addition to her attire and the fact that she’s featured alongside her signature snake and her “Jungle Queens,” the film’s plot was anchored in deeply racialized, “exotic” tropes that were made more palatable to general audiences through the prism of her whiteness, femininity, and sexuality. Courtesy of the Tawny Petillo Collection.

Zorita in Miami

A queer Southern history.
Still frame from a slow motion sequence in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde shows actress grimacing inside a vehicle.

How Slow Motion Became Cinema’s Dominant Special Effect

The turbulent late sixties saw the technique’s popularity explode—and it’s been helping moviemakers engage with the unsettling tempos of modern life ever since.
Photograph courtesy Estate of Ben Shahn / VAGA / ARS

Ben Shahn, the Lefty Artist Who Was Left Behind

Shahn was an American phenomenon, but a new retrospective suggests that we’ve come to prize his politics over his accomplishments.

Remembering One of America’s First Modern School Shootings, 50 Years Later

A teacher tells the story of 1974’s Olean, New York High School murders.
Trump poster hanging on a federal building, scowling at people below.

If Trump Could Make John Wayne the Head of Homeland Security, He Would

Trump mixes restoration with revolution—his reactionary modernism wooed Silicon Valley, but for everyone else, it signals looming repression.
Image of where the rust belt is located on a US map

Economic Mobility, Not Manufacturing Decline, Is the Real Rust Belt Story

A look at popular interpretations and actual labor fluctuations in the Rust Belt over time.
People pose next to a National Park Service sign for the Stonewall National Monument.

Stonewall National Monument Declaration: Annotated

In June 2016, President Obama proclaimed the first LGBTQ+ national monument in the United States at the site of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City.

Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State

How FDR invented national security, and why Democrats need to move on from it.
Collage of Richard Nixon and vintage images of mushroom clouds.

The President’s Weapon

Why does the power to launch nuclear weapons rest with a single American?
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