Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
New on Bunk

When Speech Meets Hate

A legal expert offers a First Amendment analysis of the summer’s violent rallies.
Confederate generals carved into the face of Stone Mountain

What Will Happen to Stone Mountain, America’s Largest Confederate Memorial?

The Georgia landmark is a testament to the enduring legacy of white supremacy.

An Intimate History of Antifa

"Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” by Mark Bray, is part history, part how-to.
Violence during the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.
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Charlottesville Was About Memory, Not Monuments

Why our history educations must be better.

Think Confederate Monuments Are Racist? Consider Pioneer Monuments

Most early pioneer statues celebrated whites dominating American Indians.

California Burning

Wildfires in the American West are becoming ever more prevalent and destructive. How did we get to this point?

Paens to the 'Postwar Order' Won't Save Us

A critique of a recent open letter by members of the foreign policy intelligentsia.
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Why We Need Government to Safeguard Against the New Robber Barons

Competition among media companies is crucial to democracy.

The Deadly Toxin Outbreak That Spurred America's Food Safety System

To prevent botulism in tinned goods, scientists and canners worked with the government to protect the public.

Ten Years After the Crash, We Are Still Living in the World It Brutally Remade

A seismic reading of the financial earthquake and its aftershocks, including those that still jolt us today.

How Medicare Was Won

The history of the fight for single-payer health care for the elderly and poor should inform today's movement to win for Medicare for All.

The Greatest Upset in Quiz Show History

Agnes Scott vs. Princeton, GE College Bowl, 1966.
"Judge in chambers swearing in a new citizen" (1910).

Second-Class Citizens?

A history of denaturalization in the US.

Pride and Prejudice? The Americans Who Fly the Confederate Flag

A listening tour in Mississippi asks flag supporters why they still support a symbol that represents pain, division and difficult history.

People Keep Shooting Up The Sign Commemorating Emmett Till’s Murder

It has been a target of vandals ever since it was dedicated.
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NAFTA Policy Reveals a Distinction Between Trump, Ross Perot, and Patrick Buchanan

Trump has echoed the NAFTA policy of his politically upstart forbearers—mostly.
View of San Francisco from the Bay.

How Could 'The Most Successful Place on Earth' Get So Much Wrong?

A new book conjures the complexity of the Bay Area and the perils of its immense, uneven wealth.

When California Was the Bear Republic

The story behind the iconic flag.
FBI piracy warning

How 1960s Film Pirates Sold Movies Before the FBI Came Knocking

The FBI storms a suspect's property, guns drawn. The crime? Film piracy.

The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock

The corporate radical who organized Visa wants to dis-organize your company.

A Look Back at a 1939 Pro-Nazi Rally and the Protesters Who Organized Against It

Seventy-eight years ago, protesters and white supremacists clashed outside of Madison Square Garden.

The Strange Decline of H.L. Mencken

No American writer has wielded such influence. So why is he so little known today?
Diagram of a Spencer rifle.

From Spencer Rifles to M-16s: A History Of The Weapons US Troops Wield In War

Muzzleloaders have evolved into smart-style automatic firearms in just 150 years.

The Wild Weird World of American Roadside Attractions

From "real" mermaids in Florida to the world's largest ball of twine, pulling off the highway is more fun than you would think.

One Man's Quest to Uncover the True Costs of Jim Crow

"It’s going to change how we think about Texas history and how we think about ourselves and how we built this state."

To Have and to Hold

Griswold v. Connecticut became about privacy; what if it had been about equality?

For 60 Years, This Powerful Conservative Group Has Worked to Crush Labor

Now the Janus decision has helped push the National Right to Work Committee and its sister organizations closer to that goal.
LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

How LBJ Saved the Civil Rights Act

Fifty years later, new accounts of its fraught passage reveal the era's real hero—and it isn’t the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump, The Resistance, and the Limits of Normcore Politics

There’s no returning to a golden age of American democracy that never existed.

Defining Privacy—and Then Getting Rid of It

The beginnings of the end of private life in the late nineteenth century.

Will America's Schools Ever Be Desegregated?

Though there are practical obstacles to school integration, it's not an unreachable ideal.

Court-Packing is the Democrats’ Nuclear Option for the Supreme Court

Why an FDR plan from the 1930s is suddenly popular again.

Protesting Law Enforcement Is as Old as America Itself

Had British authorities and their soldiers exercised de-escalation tactics, would the United States exist today?

The White Man, Unburdened

How Charles Murray stopped worrying and learned to love racism.

How Conservatives Won the Battle Over the Courts 

The right has demonstrated that winning this kind of institutional fight takes years and requires a ruthless disposition.
Protesters with KKK hoods and Goldwater signs.
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How the Right Became Addicted to Conspiracies

The conservative conspiracy lit that paved the way for Donald Trump.

Democrats Would Be Better Off Today If Bill Clinton Had Never Been President

A look at the Clinton blunders that continue to damage his party today.

How a Pivotal Voting Rights Act Case Broke America

In the five years since the landmark decision, the Supreme Court has set the stage for a new era of white hegemony.

The Justice Department Is Reinvestigating the 1955 Slaying of Emmett Till

His brutal killing shocked the world and helped inspire the civil rights movement.
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The Real Reason the Trump Administration Went to War Over Breast-Feeding

On breast-feeding, Trump is following the Reagan formula.

This Man is an Island

How the Key West we know today became a reflection of one man’s campy sense of style.

"Though Declared to be American Citizens"

The Colored Convention Movement, black citizenship, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Struggle Over the Meaning of the 14th Amendment Continues

The fight over the 150-year old language in the Constitution is a battle for the very heart of the American republic.

The Urgency of a Third Reconstruction

The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment marked a turning point in U.S. history. Yet 150 years later, its promises remain unfulfilled.
Ethel Rosenberg hugs her two sons.

An Irrevocable Separation

When the government executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the welfare of their two boys was a secondary concern.

My Dad and Henry Ford

My father was pro-Jewish propaganda when the country had an anti-semitism problem - he even met the man that inspired much of the hate. But is history repeating itself?

The Disappearing Story of the Black Homesteaders Who Pioneered The West

Once-vibrant African American homesteading communities are falling to ruin.

The President Without a Party

The trials of Jimmy Carter.

What Does It Mean to Give David Petraeus the Floor?

Some historians worry that giving the former general an invitation to keynote means giving him a pulpit.

The Partners of Greenwich Village

Did the census recognize gay couples in 1940?
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