Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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Douglas R. Stringfellow reading a statement before the press.

The Congressman Who ‘Embellished’ His Résumé Long Before George Santos

In the 1950's, Rep. Douglas Stringfellow was a promising young congressman with an incredible World War II story. Then the truth came out.
Collage illustration of a civil rights protest, inflated gas prices, and a Richard Nixon campaign poster.

Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History

Was the country’s turn toward free-market fundamentalism driven by race, class, or something else? Yes.
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.
Henry Kissinger, 1975.

Henry Kissinger: The Declassified Obituary

The primary sources on Kissinger’s controversial legacy.
Devils roasting the earth on a spit.

From Saving the Earth to Ruling the World

The transformation of the environmental movement.

Instagram's Aids Memorial: ‘History Does Not Record Itself’

The Instagram feed where friends and family post tributes to loved ones who died of Aids-related illnesses has become an extraordinary compendium of lost lives.
Barbed wire fence

The Scientist Who Lost America's First Climate War

The explorer John Wesley Powell tried to prevent the overdevelopment of the West.
New York state legislator George Michaels thinks hard at his desk

Revisiting New York’s Historic Abortion Law in “Deciding Vote”

Jeremy Workman and Robert Lyons’s film reconstructs the passage of a 1970 law that made the state a sanctuary for people seeking abortions.
U.S. President Truman smiles next to the President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann

A Brief History of the US-Israel 'Special Relationship'

A historian of the Middle East examines how connections have shifted since long before the 1948 founding of the Jewish state.
The aftermath of U.S. bombs in Neak Luong, Cambodia, on Aug. 7, 1973.

Kissinger's Bombings Likely Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Cambodians and Set Path for Khmer Rouge

A Cambodian scholar who fled the Khmer Rouge as a child writes about the legacy of Henry Kissinger, who died at the age of 100 on Nov 28, 2023.
Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally Dies

In a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and newsrooms.
Person holding a blonde American Girl doll and American Girl bag

All Dolled Up

How American Girl transformed the doll world—and why millennials love it so.

Henry Kissinger, Who Shaped World Affairs Under Two Presidents, Dies at 100

He was the only person ever to be national security adviser and secretary of state at the same time. He was also the target of relentless critics.
A collage of a feminine hand using a computer mouse and an eye layered over it as if watching.

Many Revolutions

The internet has expanded how we understand the possibilities of the trans experience.
A diagram of the parts of a flintlock pistol.

Bad Facts, Bad Law

In a recent Supreme Court oral argument about disarming domestic abusers, originalism itself was put to the test.

A People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger

For decades, Kissinger kept the great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward.
Still from "Rustin" film, on steps of Lincoln Memorial.

The Real History Behind Netflix's 'Rustin' Movie

A new film finally spotlights Bayard Rustin, the gay civil rights activist who organized the 1963 March on Washington.
A scene from the film Orphans of the Storm depicting a group carrying a sign bearing the slogan “Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité,” 1921.

The History of Equality: It’s Complicated

The strange and contradicting development of the liberal version of egalitarianism.
Illustration of multiple people drawing the same cover of a book

Big Publishing Killed the Author

How corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.
A poster of a colonial man ringing a bell in front of Independence Hall with the words "4 Minute Men" at the top
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The US Propaganda Machine of World War I

As the United States prepared to enter World War I, the government created the first modern state propaganda office, the Committee on Public Information.
Italian Americans watch a policeman arrest a man
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The Surveillance of Immigrants Remade American Policing

Modern surveillance policing is rooted in approaches adopted a century ago.
Painting of waves crashing in the ocean by Winslow Homer

After Melville

In every generation, writers and readers find new ways to plumb the depths of Herman Melville and his work.
Vegetable stand at the Mulberry St. bend, photograph by Jacob Riis.

Policing Unpolicable Space: The Mulberry Bend

Sanitation reformers confront a neighborhood seemingly immune to state intervention.
Cacti in a field

The Lost Savannas of Arizona

Until about 100 years ago, grasses up to two feet high blanketed swaths of the Sonoran Desert.
A view from Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

How the Ice Age Shaped New York

Long ago, the region lay under an ice sheet thousands of feet thick. It ended abruptly in what are now the boroughs, leaving the city with a unique landscape.
People scavenging through garbage on a barge in New York City
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A History of Garbage

The history of garbage dumps is the history of America.
A man wearing a cowboy outfit shoots at a series of targets in a sand pit

Home on the (Firing) Range: Gunfight Reenactments, “Old West” Competitive Shooting, and the Myth of Authenticity

Reenactments of the frontier west, complete with cowboy shootouts on main streets, reproduce a narrative of history that is widely accepted by millions.
Blanche and Alfred Knopf

Toward the Next Literary Mafia

Understanding history can help us understand what will be necessary if we’re serious about finally having a more diverse, less exclusionary publishing industry.

Surviving a Wretched State

A discussion on the difficulty of keeping faith in a foundationally anti-Black republic.
Gen. James Longstreet.

The Conquered General

The back-and-forth life of Confederate James Longstreet.
Black residents of Natchez, Miss., walk alongside a railroad track in August 1940.

One of the Biggest U.S. Slave Markets Finally Reckons With Its Past

Natchez, Miss., is beginning to highlight the history of its enslaved people—including at a Black-owned bed and breakfast in former slave quarters.
Painting of the Great Fire of Pittsburgh from right outside the city

The Asbestos Times

Asbestos was a miracle material, virtually impervious to fire. But as we fixed city fires in other ways, we came to learn about its horrific downsides.
Untitled (Strike), Dox Thrash, c. 1940.

Hard Times

The radical art of the Depression years.
The front of the Midgeville asylum in Georgia

What Makes a Prison?

Wherever we find the state engaged in potentially lethal repression, we find prison.
Independence Day Celebration in Centre Square by John Lewis Krimmel (1787–1821).

The Brief Period, 200 Years Ago, When American Politics Was Full of “Good Feelings”

James Monroe’s 1817 goodwill tour kicked off a decade of party-less government – but he couldn’t stop the nation from dividing again.
Policemen confronting a crowd of protesters

How a Revolutionary Was Born

Carl Skoglund's early life as a militant worker in Sweden prepared him for leadership in the 1934 Teamster Strikes.
Winnifred Eaton

The First Asian American Screenwriter

The woman with the pen name Onoto Watanna had a stunningly productive literary career as a cookbook writer, novelist, and screenwriter.
Map showing the U.S. broken up into four countries, including an expansive Confederate States of America.

A Map of the Disunited States, "as Traitors and Tyrants Would Have It"

The U.S. divided into Pacific, Atlantic, Interior and Confederate States.
Folded newspapers sitting in a printing factory

The Times-Picayune's Historical Use of the N-Word

A survey of the New Orleans paper from 1837 to 1914 shows reporters and editors frequent used the racial slur to trivialize Black people in news and commentary.
Front page of the Saturday Evening Post

The Persistence of the Saturday Evening Post

When George Horace Lorimer took over as editor of the Saturday Evening Post, America was a patchwork of communities. There was no sense of nation or unity.
Pearl Curran

Ghostwriter and Ghost: The Strange Case of Pearl Curran & Patience Worth

In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England Puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board.
Corn in a basket.
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Translating Corn

To most of the world, “corn” is “maize,” a word that comes from the Taíno mahizwas. Not for British colonists in North America, though.
U.S. Capitol building

Searching for the Perfect Republic

On the 14th amendment – and if it might stop Trump.
Digitally altered portrait of a man in a suit with his face pixelated, framed by computer windows.

What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes

Experts have warned that utterly realistic A.I.-generated videos might wreak havoc through deception. What’s happened is troubling in a different way.
A stylized drawing of Bill Erquitt.

The Death of a Relic Hunter

Bill Erquitt was an unforgettable character among Georgia’s many Civil War enthusiasts. After he died, his secrets came to light.
Women with blankets and fans, in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The Missing Politics of Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

Blaming corrupt individuals rather than federal Indian policy for the violence and exploitation perpetrated against the Osage Nation misses the mark.
Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese on the set of "Killers of the Flower Moon."

How Publicity of Killers of the Flower Moon Recalls Rosebud Yellow Robe’s 1950 Hollywood Tour

On the performance of authenticity and the native stories left to tell.
The shrouded bodies of people killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

“Genocide” Is the Wrong Word

We reach for the term when we want to condemn the worst crimes, but the UN’s Genocide Convention excuses more perpetrators of mass murder than it condemns.
Wikimedia Foundation servers.

Dead Links

Maintaining the internet data of dead people.
A bearded man dressed as a lumberjack with an axe resting on his shoulder.

Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents

One hundred years ago, a crisis in urban masculinity created the lumberjack aesthetic. Now it's making a comeback.
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