Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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Picture of a worried young mother holding a sleeping newborn baby.
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Whose Breast is Best?: "Mom-shaming" in the British Atlantic World

Claims that mothers lacking formula should just breastfeed repeats a centuries-old mistake.
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Extremism in America: Out of the Shadows

According to experts who monitor the radical right, the white supremacist ideology that police say drove the Buffalo gunman has begun moving into the mainstream.
Men fighting outdoors, one pointing a gun.

On the Antifascist Activists Who Fought in the Streets Long Before Antifa

The rich American history of Nazi-punching.
After his shooting, a hospitalized Wallace holds up a newspaper touting his victories in the Maryland and Michigan Democratic presidential primaries.

How a Failed Assassination Attempt Pushed George Wallace to Reconsider His Segregationist Views

Fifty years ago, a fame-seeker shot the polarizing politician five times, paralyzing him from the waist down.
Book cover for Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage," showing a photo of incarcerated men speaking to the media.

How Rikers Island Made New York

In “Captives,” former Rikers detainee Jarrod Shanahan traces the history of New York City’s sprawling jail complex, and its centrality to brutal class struggle.
Floral wallpaper, c. 1875. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Collection, gift of Harvey Smith.

Flower Power

On the women who kickstarted the ecological restoration movement in America.
Photograph of candles, bouquets and signs left at a memorial for the Buffalo Shooting victims, May 2022.
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The Buffalo Shooting Exposes How History Shapes the Present

This northern city was shaped by racial terrorism and persistent advocacy for Black liberation.
Photo of two men

The Renegade Ideas Behind the Rise of American Pragmatism

William James, Charles Peirce, and the questions that roiled them.
Statue of Thomas Jefferson and an American flag.
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Jefferson's Other Legacy: Religious Liberty

Religious bigotry is only less pressing today than racial bigotry because of progress Jefferson helped bring about.
Engraving of the Boston Massacre by Paul Revere.

Crispus Attucks Needs No Introduction. Or Does He?

The African American Patriot, who died in the Boston Massacre, was erased from visual history. Black abolitionists revived his memory.
Reflection on glass of a bitcoin symbol and a downward trending stock market graph.
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Digital Currencies Are Repeating the Problems of 19th-Century Paper Money

History’s lessons for the volatile digital currency markets.
Civil War re-enactors at the Bentonville Battlefield in Four Oaks, N.C., March 21, 2015.

After Charlottesville, New Shades of Gray in a Changing South

Celebrations of the Confederacy have steadily ebbed, and the recent confrontations will accelerate this retreat among all but the extremists.
People looking down at words written in chalk on the street as a makeshift memorial of the Buffalo shooting.

The Terrifying Familiarity of the Buffalo Shooting Suspect’s Extremist Screed

The new fascists don’t wear uniforms; they make memes.

Inventing Freedom

Using manumission to disentangle blackness and enslavement in Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia.
Children's coloring sheets of overturned police cars.

Magic Actions

Looking back on the George Floyd rebellion.
Picture of former President Bill Clinton looking downtrodden.

The Disastrous Legacy of the New Democrats

Clintonites taught their party how to talk about helping people without actually doing it.
A worker sits with his head in his hands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 24, 2008, as the markets endured losses.

How The Neoliberal Order Triumphed — And Why It’s Now Crumbling

Historian Gary Gerstle lays out an era's policies and ideologies, and what undermined them.
William F. Buckley, Jr. being interviewed on What’s Happening Mr. Silver.
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On the Right: NET and Modern Conservatism

In the 1960s, the precursor to PBS explored the burgeoning conservative movement, providing a remarkable window into the history of conservatism.
Oil rigs just south of town extract crude for Chevron at sunrise in Taft, California, on July 22, 2008.

How Private Oil Companies Took Over U.S. Energy Security

And why it’s time to take it back.
A pair of color stereogram photographs featuring people sitting in front of a desert stone structure.

New Look, Same Great Look

The history of humans being confounded by color photography.
Abortion advertisement in the National Police Gazette, 1847.

“Female Monthly Pills” and the Coded Language of Abortion Before Roe

Our future might look much like our past, with pills as a major part of abortion access—and an obsessive target for abortion opponents.
Abortion rights demonstrators confront an antiabortion protester on May 14 outside the Supreme Court.
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What Everyone Gets Wrong About Evangelicals and Abortion

Evangelicals started speaking out against legal abortion long before the late 1970s.
A Ukranian peasant family poses with sacks of grain.

'The New York Times' Can't Shake the Cloud Over a 90-Year-Old Pulitzer Prize

In 1932, Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for stories defending Soviet policies that led to the deaths of millions of Ukrainians.
A black father watching his child play with blocks, both of them smiling.

A Brief History of Black Names, from Perlie to Latasha

A scholar disproves the long-held assumption that black names are a recent phenomenon.
Empty shelves in a grocery store, specifically an aisle for infant formula products.
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Lessons From World War II Can Help us Navigate the Baby Formula Shortage

Children from poor families or with special formula needs are most at risk.
Picture of DeFord Bailey holding a harmonica amplified by a gourd.

The Unsung Black Musician Who Changed Country Music

From the moment DeFord Bailey stepped onto a stage in Nashville, country music would never be the same. Decades after his death he finally got his due.
A woman lights a candle at a memorial for the Buffalo shooting victims, May 2022.
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The Mass Shooting in Buffalo Reflects Deeply Rooted American Ideas

Until we grapple with our history, white supremacist terrorism will keep happening.
People looking at the Tops grocery store where police are in the parking lot after a mass shooting.

Making Sense of the Racist Mass Shooting in Buffalo

An expert on the white-power movement and the “great replacement” theory puts the act of terror in context.
Parade of women suffragists, holding signs, dressed in white.

When Lesbians Led the Women's Suffrage Movement

In 1911, lesbians led the nation’s largest feminist organization. They promoted a diverse and inclusive women’s rights movement.
Collage of a photograph of a boy over a photo of Castro and his entourage.

My Brother’s Keeper

Early in the Cuban Revolution, my mother made a consequential decision.
A woman tends to a lawn at the corner of Confederate Lane and Plantation Parkway in the Mosby Woods neighborhood of Fairfax on Wednesday. The city is considering changing several names in the Civil War-themed development, but neighbors are divided. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

A Civil War Among Neighbors Over Confederate-Themed Streets

Debates between neighbors escalate over the use of Confederate names within a Northern Virginia neighborhood.
A 1939 photo of Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo (D) of Mississippi. (Harris & Ewing Collection/Library of Congress)

The Roots of the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ Believed to Fuel Buffalo Suspect

The white supremacist conspiracy theory that has inspired horrific violence in the past five years dates back to Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo.
Iroquois Leaders

One of the Most Important American Documents You’ve Never Heard Of

Colonial lessons in civility from the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee.
Cuban Women class photo at Harvard University in the summer of 1900.

‘Cuba: An American History’ Review: That Infernal Little Republic

Cuba has spent its entire existence as a state and much of its late colonial past in Uncle Sam’s purported backyard.
Civil Rights March on Washington, people holding signs calling for integration

How White Violence Turned a Peaceful Civil Rights Demonstration Into Mayhem

Winfred Rembert on protesting in the Jim Crow South and getting arrested.
Florida Governor Rob DeSantis addresses a crowd behind a podium reading "freedom from indoctrination"
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Too Many White Parents Don’t Understand The True Purpose of Public Schools

Black Americans continue to fight for access to the public school systems their forebears created, against a history of white backlash and appropriation.
Stacked pizza boxes

The Hidden Histories of To-Go Container Art

Who drew that winking chef on your pizza box?
Horses and carriages in front of funeral home

Report of Action Not Received

An accounting of racist murders in nineteenth-century America.
Four African-Americans in front of a McDonalds restaurant

The Intertwined History of McDonald’s and Black America

In good ways and bad, the Golden Arches have always loomed large in the African American experience.
Elderly woman holding a Gray Panthers sign. (from Wikimedia Commons)

Gray Panthers: Bending Bureaucracy and Building Power

The Gray Panthers empowered elderly people to see themselves as experts capable of disentangling convoluted bureaucracies.
Photograph of the famous Alamo, where the Battle of the Alamo was fought between the Republic of Texas and Mexico in 1836.

Texas' White Guy History Project

The 1836 Project will indoctrinate new Texans with fables about our history.
Neil Armstrong and the American flag on the moon.

Apollo 11 Capsule Foil and Memories of Plucking NASA’s Moonmen From the Sea

A recollection of a NASA employee's experiences with Apollo 11 and 12.
The Rikers Island docks.

The Long Crisis on Rikers Island

A new book about Rikers Island is essentially a labor history, revealing how jail guards seized control from managers, politicians, and judges.
National civil rights leaders (L-R) John Lewis, Whitney Young Jr, A. Philip Randolph, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins pose behind a banquet table at the Hotel Roosevelt as they meet to formulate plans for the March on Washington and to bring about the passage of civil rights legislation, on July 2, 1963 in New York City. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

The Emancipatory Past and Future of Black Politics

75 years ago, black leaders and activists shared a consensus around the importance of the labor movement and multiracial class organizing for black liberation.
Tilted, weathered headstone near a fallen tree in Copp's Hill Burying Ground.

The Forgotten Legacy of Boston’s Historic Black Graveyard

At one of Boston’s historical burial grounds, more than 1,000 Black Bostonians were laid to rest in unmarked graves. Their legacy continues to haunt us today.
Lumpkin’s Jail; engraving from A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, 1895

A Fable of Agency

Kristen Green’s "The Devil’s Half Acre" recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.
Drawing depicting different groups of refugees. Above, a white woman carries an infant and holds the hand of a young child. They are wearing yellow and blue--the colors of Ukraine. They are standing on a red carpet, and it is being rolled out for them--an easy entrance amidst barbed wire. Meanwhile, at bottom right, other refugees are obscured in shadow, and covered by a thick red line (potentially another carpet). They are non-white refugees, and their faces are turned away from the viewer.

United States to Refugees: Don't Give us Your Tired, Your Poor!

Putting out the welcome mat for white Christians—while slamming the door in the faces of other migrants—is an American tradition.
Photo of Richard Holsbrook on an abstract paint background.

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

After serving in Vietnam, Richard Holbrooke became a proponent of soft power. He would then contribute greatly to American foreign policy.
Illustration of slavecatchers surrounding a fugitive.

‘A World Turned Upside Down’: How Slavery Morphed into Today’s Carceral State

A new book uses the story of a former slave trader who profited after the Civil War by trafficking in convict labor to trace the historical roots of mass incarceration and racial profiling.
Smiley face with game pieces as facial features against a blue background

What the History of AI Tells Us About its Future

IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue was eclipsed by the neural-net revolution. Now, 25 years on, the machine may get the last laugh.
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