Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
New on Bunk
Newspaper headline stating "Mrs. Sarah Corleto to become nurse"

How an Embalming License Freed Sarah Corleto from an Abusive Husband

She used her work to live an autonomous life in a time when women were often trapped by socially constructed gender roles and systematic oppression.
Lithograph of people fleeing the Great Fire of Peshtigo on horseback and on foot.

Why America's Deadliest Wildfire Was Largely Forgotten

In 1871, the Wisconsin town Peshtigo burned to the ground, killing up to 2,500. But due to another event at the time, many have never heard about the disaster.
Picture of the "Words That Made Us."

Context and Consequences

On Akhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us,” a new history of America’s constitutional conversation.
Book cover of "Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy That Transfixed the Nation"

Wellspring

The classic story of the child down the well played out in Southern California at the dawn of television.
Photograph of two of the original organizers preparing for the first Earth Day (1970). At left, a woman holds up two advertisements for the event. In front, a man stares into the camera (Denis Hayes) while holding a phone.

The Fate of Earth Day

What has gone wrong with the modern environmental movement and its political organizing.
William Faulkner in front of bookshelf

William Faulkner’s Tragic Vision

In Yoknapatawpha County, the past never speaks with a single voice.
INTERIM ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES A map of slavery laws in the United States, from 1775 to 1865.

A Reckoning With How Slavery Ended

A new book examines the ways white slaveholders were compensated, while formerly enslaved people were not.
Book cover featuring abstract watercolor splotches behind the title "American Exceptionalism."

"A New History of an Old Idea"

Richard Cándida Smith on Ian Tyrrell’s "American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea."
Illustration of T. Thomas Fortune

Abolition Democracy’s Forgotten Founder

While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.
Illustration of Cedric Robinson by Joe Ciardiello.

Cedric Robinson’s Radical Democracy

Rejecting the resignation of the 1970s and ’80s, Robinson found in the disinvested ruins of the city a new egalitarian form of politics.
Photo of Danyel Smith.

Danyel Smith Tells the History of Black Women in Pop Music

The author discusses Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight, racism in magazines, and why she’s so hopeful for the future of music and writing.
MLK giving his Vietnam speech

“Somehow This Madness Must Cease.”

Revisiting MLK Jr.’s sermon against the Vietnam War.
Gladys Bentley

The Overlooked LGBTQ+ History of the Harlem Renaissance

Acknowledging the queer culture of the Harlem Renaissance is essential in order to paint a full picture of the period.
Book cover of Pushing Cool, featuring a photo of a cigarette ad on the side of a building.

Selling Menthol: On Keith Wailoo’s “Pushing Cool”

A history of the menthol cigarette and its effects on Black people.
Illustration of bishops titled "The Mitred Minuet"

No Bishops, No Kings: Religious Iconography and Popular Memory of the American Revolution

Popular religious iconography and art in the decades preceding the Revolution offer a fuller narrative arc of the development of revolutionary ideas within American society.
Dr Elhamy Khalil and Attorney Awny Barsoum's arrival in New York in 1963

Egyptians in New York: The Untold Stories of Early Immigrants to America

When the US relaxed immigration restrictions in the late 50s, a small Egyptian population emerged. Their early experiences are now available via a new archive.
McGeorge Bundy with Lyndon Johnson in 1967

American Mandarins

David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?
Photographs of Helen “Ned” Dutcher and Edith Joiner. Both are resting against a set of bicycles. Taken April 25, 1897.

How Bicycles Liberated Women in Victorian America

Cycling culture offered individual women, as well as couples, greater freedom in daily life.
Shipping Company Advertisements in Kawkab Amirka.

Phoenician or Arab, Lebanese or Syrian?

Who were the early immigrants to America?
Map of Sterling Heights

What Explains Michigan's Large Arab American Community?

Why has Michigan continued to draw so many immigrants from the Arab world, creating one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East?
A 1907 photograph of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.

What I Don’t Know

At the heart of my family tree are only questions and mysteries.
Women deejays at Shyvers Multiphone studio in the Seattle-Tacoma area.

The First Music Streaming Service

In the 1930s, a Seattle entrepreneur created a successful analog streaming platform—and ran it out of a drugstore.
Robot with group of people at poker table

The Automation Myth

To what degree can we blame automation for deindustrialization and class decomposition?
Lithograph of African Americans in prayer as Liberty lays a wreath on Charles Sumner’s casket. By Matt Morgan, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1874.

Reconciliation Process

When Charles Sumner died in 1874, a bill he had sponsored two years earlier threatened to overshadow his legacy.
Gov. Ron DeSantis shows an image from the children's book "Call Me Max" by transgender author Kyle Lukoff before signing the Parental Rights in Education bill in Shady Hills, Fla. on March 28.

How Anita Bryant Helped Spawn Florida's LGBTQ Culture War

Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, is part of a long legacy of anti-gay rhetoric and legislation in the state.
Cover of Crisco cookbook aimed at "the Jewish Housewife."

Inside the World's Largest Jewish Cookbook Collection

A librarian with a love for eBay built this trove of culinary history.
Photo of Jackie Robinson and Jacki Robinson Jr at the Youth March for Integrated Schools demonstration in Washington DC with Harry Belafonte.

Jackie Robinson, Pioneer of BDS

The Dodgers great didn’t just break Major League Baseball’s color line. He was also an activist whose legacy reaches from Brooklyn to South Africa to Palestine.
Jackie Robinson addresses civil rights supporters protesting outside the 1964 GOP National Convention.

Jackie Robinson Was a Radical – Don't Listen to the Sanitized Version of History

Before Colin Kaepernick, Jackie Robinson wrote, ‘I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world.’
Brooklyn Dodgers infielder Jackie Robinson in uniform, circa 1945.

Jackie Robinson’s Last Fight

As baseball celebrates the 75th anniversary of Robinson’s breaking the color line, it’s worth remembering a man at odds with his own myth.
Chemical lab buildings around American University campus.

The Dangerous Ghosts of WWI Research in Spring Valley

World War I saw the advent of chemical weaponry, and a mysterious chapter in the history of American University in Northwest DC.
A still from the 1955 film 'Wiretapper.' The still depicts a man wearing headphones and touching a wire.

When New York City was a Wiretapper’s Dream

Eavesdropping flourished after WWII, aided by legal loopholes, clever hacks, and “private ears”.
US military pilots operating Predator drones from the ground control station.

The Forgotten Crime of War Itself

A new book argues that efforts to humanize war with smarter weaponry have obscured the task of making peace the first goal of foreign policy.
East L.A. shopkeeper and Christian Syrian immigrant Mansur Nahra (seated), serving as best man at the 1929 wedding of his employee, Isidoro.

Middle East Expert Finds Syrian Americans Comprise a Rich Multiplicity of Identities

On the vibrant history of LA’s thriving Syrian American community and its unexpected links with Latin America.
Image of Hassan, a Syrian-American man

Syrian in Sioux Falls

In the 1920s, Syrian-Americans were compelled to prove their worth in a society where nativism was on the rise and citizenship often meant being considered white.
Vintage stereogram of Chinatown, San Francisco, ca. 1920s-30s.

How a California Archive Reconnected a New Mexico Family with its Chinese Roots

Aimee Towi Mae Tang’s Chinese American family never talked about the past. She decided to change that.
Painting of a ship in stormy waters, Thomas Buttersworth, A Topsail Schooner in a Heavy Swell

Insurance For (and Against) the Empire

Marine insurance itself was a business that flourished during periods of war and uncertainty. It had a complex relationship with the British state.
Oil refinery

How Polluting Industries Mobilized to Block Climate Action

Since its inception, the IPCC itself has been the target of corporate obstructionism.
A Jewish family welcomes home their Navy man and gathers for a Passover Seder at their home in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1943.

How a Coffee Company and a Marketing Maven Brewed Up a Passover Tradition

A collaboration between advertiser Joseph Jacobs and the famous coffee company produced the classic U.S. haggadah.
Illustration of Spanish slaves unloading ice.

Cuba & the US: Necessary Mirrors

Exponentially more enslaved Africans were forced to the lands that now make up Latin America rather than the United States. Where is their story?
Couple kissing at the opening of the Berlin Wall

Has Neoliberalism Really Come to an End?

A conversation with historian Gary Gerstle about understanding neoliberalism as a bipartisan worldview and how the political order it ushered in has crumbled. 
Sketch of the ‘Rising Sun’ design carved in the armchair used by George Washington during the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

A Rising or Setting Sun

A review of how Dennis Rasmussen understands America's Founding Fathers and their disillusions with the American experiment.
Places of origin for early Eastern Mediterranean immigrants. The dot size reflects the relative number of immigrants.

“Like A Wolf Who Fell Upon Sheep”: Early Lebanese Immigrants and Religion in America

For some Lebanese immigrants, religion was a comfort, providing a sense of home in an new world. For others, it was a constant reminder of what was left behind.
American Catholic book cover

Americanism and the ‘Roman’ Catholic

Daniel James Sundahl reviews D. G. Hart’s American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War.
A family photo shows Balqes Jassem with her late husband, Abdul Ameer Alwan, and their daughter, Aman Alwan, at home in Richardson, Tex. The older Alwan was an Iraqi painter who passed away in 2015. The family came to the United States as Iraqi refugees in 2007.

New Americans

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis displaced by war have settled in the U.S., their journeys spurred by tragedy and loss in the wake of 9/11.
A crowd watches a roller skater dance at block party in the Bronx.

The Stories of the Bronx

"Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin" is a vibrant cultural history that looks beyond pervasive narratives of cultural renaissance and urban neglect.
Former President Donald Trump in Selma, North Carolina

The Historians Take a First Crack at Donald J. Trump

On the promises and perils of very recent history.
Man holding a poster of Malcolm X, African American Day Parade, 2010 in Harlem.

Malcolm X’s Gospel

A look into how Malcolm X employed gospel rhetoric to critique the mainstream civil rights movement for catering to white Christianity.
Painting of duel between Charles de Lameth and the Marquis de Castries.

A Slap, Followed by a Duel

Dueling was a dangerous, ritualized response to a real (or perceived) slight. It may also have been a means of proving one's social and economic capital.
Portraits of Dean Dixon, William Grant Still, and Margaret Bonds, three African American classical musicians.

A Prophecy Unfulfilled?

What a new book and six companion videos have to say about the fate of Black classical music in America.
Motorcycle in sideview mirror

The Invention of “Accidents”

Thousands of Americans die preventable deaths each year. Why do we consider them mishaps?
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