Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
New on Bunk
Advertisement commemorating 25 years of video games since the release of Oregon Trail.

Playing in the Past

Gameplay can be useful in history classrooms – but manufacturers have to think about how children will be affected by the competition.
1996 Photograph of Robert B. Smith, 18, is escorted from jail to arraignment for the 1966 slayings of five people in Mesa, Arizona.

The Story of the First Copycat Mass Shooter

Robert Benjamin Smith inaugurated murder for the media age.
Studio portrait of American violinist Maud Powell, c. 1909
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Women, Men, and Classical Music

As more women embraced music as a profession, more men became worried that the world of the orchestra was losing its masculinity.
The XVIII Airborne Corps Headquarters sign is displayed at Fort Bragg, N.C. on June 28, 2019.

Panel Unveils Nine Army Base Name Recommendations

The commission is charged with renaming bases whose names currently honor Confederate leaders.
An young African American man speaking at a podium with a sign "SDS: Black Power and Change"

Friends of SNCC and The Birth of The Movement

The Friends of the SNCC published the story of the struggle for freedom in the 1960s.
FDR flashing the victory sign.

Franklin Roosevelt: The Father of Gun Control

One of the great pieces of unfinished business for the Democratic Party.
Drawing of men and women of the Oneida community playing croquet.
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The Oneida Community Moves to the OC

The Oneida Community's Christian form of collectivism was transported to California in the 1880s, when the original Oneida Community fell apart.
Borden logo featuring the smiling face of Elsie the Cow in the center of a flower.
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Who Was Elsie, Besides the World’s Most Famous Cow?

In the Great Depression, Borden sought a new spokescow to help preserve its traditional agrarian image.
Charlton Heston (left), then president of the NRA, meets with fellow leaders Wayne LaPierre (far right) and Jim Baker (center) on April 30, 1999, ahead of the NRA's annual meeting in Denver. Around the same time, leaders discussed how to respond to the shooting at Columbine High School in nearby Littleton, Colo. More than 20 years later, NPR has obtained secret recordings of those conversations.

A Secret Tape Made After Columbine Shows the NRA's Evolution on School Shootings

In 1999, NRA leaders agonized over what to do about Columbine, paving the way for the group's approach to mass shootings ever since.
Samantha Hull looks for books at the Ephrata Public Library on March 2. Hull has been fighting book bans as a school librarian in Lancaster County, Pa., where conservatives are pushing to remove books that touch on gender identity and racism.
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Conservatives Long Ago Lost The War Over America’s Public Schools

As conservative groups give up on public schools, the fight today is about looting public resources.
Colorful rainbow image of a brain.

Mental Illness Is Not in Your Head

Decades of biological research haven't improved diagnosis or treatment. We should look to society, not to the brain.
Illustration of people on different types of bicycles

Bicycles Have Evolved. Have We?

Biking innovations brought riders freedom. But in a world built for cars, life behind handlebars is both charmed and dangerous.
Hillary Clinton addresses her supporters in Philadelphia the night before the 2016 presidential election.

Would These Undelivered Speeches Really Have Changed History?

At a time of upheaval, we want to believe that better leaders have the power to change the course of history. But counterfactuals are never simple.
Richard Nixon, Pat Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Betty Ford walking away from White House

Regime Change, American Style

A new book about Watergate is the first to stress how much we still do not know many of the basic facts about the burglary at its center.
Poster with women pledging to "pay not more than top legal prices" and "accept no rationed goods without giving up ration stamps"

Politics and the Price Level

On inflation, institutions, and the governance of the price level.
Covers of annual editions of Bob Damron's Address Book from the 1970s.

Mapping the Gay Guides

Visualizing Queer Space and American Life
Salmon P. Chase

The Most Important 19th Century American You've Never Heard Of

A new book chronicles the life of the 19th century political giant of Salmon Chase.
A fat-free label on a food product.

The Big Fat Lie of the Fat-Free Food Movement

For decades, consumers were duped into believing that a fat-free food label would put them on track for weight loss, when the complete opposite was true.
An American soldier guards a Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, Calif., on May 23, 1943.
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Is it Possible to Condemn One Empire Without Upholding Another?

The danger of making wars into moral crusades.
Shirley Temple Black speaking at the 1969 U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Shirley Temple Black's Remarkable Second Act as a Diplomat

An unpublished memoir reveals how the world’s most famous child actress became a star of the environmental movement.
Photograph of Rose Greenhow, right, with her daughter, Rose, at left. She was held in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington with her 8-year-old daughter, “Little Rose,” during the Civil War after repeatedly being caught spying for the Confederacy.

The Most Audacious Confederate Spies — and How They Got Away With It

These men, women and children betrayed the Union and spied for the Confederacy. They're featured in a new online exhibit from the Wall of Spies Experience.
Musicians and producers around a soundboard listening to a recording.

How Stax Records Set an Example for America

Nelson “Little D” Ross talks soul and significance with music historian Robert Gordon.
Guinan Phillips, 31, attends a candlelit memorial for victims of the mass shooting at Tops supermarket in Buffalo. (Heather Ainsworth for The Washington Post)
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The Tie Between the Buffalo Shooting and Banning Abortion

The two may seem unconnected, but a centuries-long history of panic about White birth rates binds them together.
A photo of Nelson Bellamy next to a photo of a boardwalk full of people sunbathing and wading.

“The Splendor of Our Public and Common Life”

Edward Bellamy's utopia influenced a generation of urban planners.
The candidates for Miss America 2020 walk in dresses and heels.
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Why We Should Say Goodbye to the Miss America Pageant

The event originally borrowed sashes and pageantry from suffragists — whose vision for women we should honor instead.
Elizabeth Warren at a debate podium.
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Why Family Separation Is So Central to Trump’s Immigration Vision

Strengthening family ties has been key to overcoming nativism — and in 2020, it can do so again.
Portrait photograph of Daniel Bell sitting on a chair

The Homeless Radical

Daniel Bell was the prophet of a failed centrism. By the end of his life, he was revisiting the leftism of his youth.
A circa 1830 illustration of a slave auction in America. Rischgitz/Hulton Archive—Getty Images.

'The Slaves Dread New Year's Day the Worst': The Grim History of January 1

New Year's Day used to be widely known as "Hiring Day" or "Heartbreak Day"
Nixon, sitting in front of a Meet the Press backdrop, gestures to someone out of frame as a production crew member adjusts his chair.

The Secret History Of Richard Nixon, Mets Sicko

The less known story of Richard Nixon and his genuine love and care for his hometown team, the New York Mets.

The Dawn of Big Government and the Administrative State

A new book correctly diagnoses how non-elected agencies are running the country, but falls short on how it got this way.
African-American man holding a medical bag, posing behind horse-drawn carriage.

Doctors Without Borders

On the Black doctors who received their medical degrees and a new sort of freedom in Europe.
Painting of an ocean by the British painter J. M. W. Turner, 1840-1845. Pictured is a stormy sea, its waves breaking on a shore.

The Sea According to Rachel Carson

Her first three books were odes to the world’s bodies of water and their creative power over all life forms.
A diagram of early bicycle wheels.

Going Nowhere Fast

The strange past and even stranger future of the stationary bicycle.
Up close picture of a baby bottle.

What Parents Did Before Baby Formula

The shortage is a calamity—not a victory for breastfeeding.
People standing on the sidewalk and walking by Rick Allmen’s Café Bizarre on Third Street, November 11, 1959. Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images.

Wanna-Beats: In 1959, Café Bizarre Gave Straights an Entree Into Beatnik Culture

“At the remove of time, it’s really hard to tell the difference between beat and beatsploitation.”
Artwork of Hannah Arendt looking through the outline of a map of Ukraine.

Why We Should Read Hannah Arendt Now

"The Origins of Totalitarianism" has much to say about a world of rising authoritarianism.
Picture of two warring sides of the abortion debate in a heated exchange.

The Myth That Roe Broke America

The debate over abortion is an important part of the story of polarization in American politics, but it is not its genesis.
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.
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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.
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