Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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The cover of "Beyond Norma Rae" by Aimee Loiselle

Who Makes the American Working Class: Women Workers and Culture

Female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds fought to tell their own stories.
Four typewriters including the Nazi-built Urania model.

Why the World of Typewriter Collectors Splits Down the Middle When These Machines Come Up for Sale

In this new hobby, I found so many stories.
Audubon painting of an eagle with a rabbit in its talons.

John James Audubon, the American "Hunter-Naturalist"

Audubon drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature, helping them see it in national and environmental terms.
Line graph showing a rise in Louisiana's prison incarceration rate since 1978.

Louisiana’s Turn to Mass Incarceration: The Building of a Carceral State

How Louisiana built a carceral state during the War on Crime.
South Pacific.

You've Got to Be Carefully Taught

Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific shows the limits–and power–of mainstream entertainment in addressing weighty social topics.
Rose Mackenberg.

The Ghost-Busting 'Girl Detective' Who Awed Houdini

As an undercover investigator, Rose Mackenberg unmasked hundreds of America’s fake psychics.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar slam dunking basketball

How Lew Alcindor Became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The early years of a future basketball icon.
An assortment of Girl Scout cookies.

The Truth Behind the Girl Scout Cookie Graveyard

Even popular cookies can end up permanently cut from the roster.
The United Farm Worker’s 1,000 Mile March, 1975.

How Unions Are Made

A new history of labor organizing in Coachella tells us the story of the United Farm Workers and how its rank-and-file members drove the union to success.
Branko Milanovic, 2017.

The Problematic Past, Present, and Future of Inequality Studies

An intellectual history of inequality in economic theory reveals the ideological reasons behind the field’s resurgence in the last few decades.
Boxes with Black American history inside

The Black Box of Race

In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly reinvented themselves.
Painting of Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles.

How Arnold Schoenberg Changed Hollywood

He moved to California during the Nazi era, and his music—which ranged from the lushly melodic to the rigorously atonal—caught the ears of everyone.
Old car holding up a mining chute on the over of the book “The Bootleg Coal Rebellion”

Rock-Fuel and Warlike People: On Mitch Troutman’s “The Bootleg Coal Rebellion”

Native son Jonah Walters finds something entirely too innocent about the tales told about the anthracite industry’s origins.
A photograph of the SS Eastland.

Checking out Historical Chicago: Cynthia Pelayo's "Forgotten Sisters"

The SS Eastland disaster and Chicago's ghosts.
"A Grain of Sand" record

Charting the Music of a Movement

Galvanized by an act of racial violence, the band A Grain of Sand brought a new version of Asian American activism and identity to the folk music scene.
A botanical drawing of a pawpaw on a branch.

Consider the Pawpaw

For some, it is a luscious dessert, a delightful treasure hiding in the woods. For others, it is, to say the least, an acquired taste. It is an enigma.
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Lessons from the 1976 Republican Convention: Why Ronald Reagan Lost the Nomination

In 1976, Ronald Reagan found owning the soul of a party isn’t the same as taking home its nomination.
Cover of essays by John Dickinson.

Principled Resistance and the Trouble with Tea

For what did these Americans endure such painful hardship and sacrifice? For what were they taking such a significant stand? Surely, it wasn’t just about tea!
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.

Five Centuries Ago, France Came to America

This is the story of Giovanni da Verrazzano, who never reached Asia, but became the first European to set foot on the site of the future city of New York.
Etching of friends playing a game of chess, dated to the nineteenth century.

Get Capitalists’ Grubby Hands Off Our Hobbies

Christian moralists long promoted hobbies as a way to occupy idle hands, bringing the work ethic into free time. Today hobbies risk turning into side hustles.
Spectators and witnesses at the trial for a case involving an automobile accident, Oxford, North Carolina, 1939.

A ‘Wary Faith’ in the Courts

A groundbreaking new book demonstrates that even during the days of slavery, African Americans knew a lot more about legal principles than has been imagined.
A crowd of people holds a up red banner of the Cuban Revolution leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Remember When the U.S. Secretly Built a Social Network to Destabilize Cuba?

U.S.-funded social networks were launched in 2010 with ZunZuneo and Piramideo in 2013.
Carl Van Vechten's portrait of John A. Williams, 1962.

What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

John A. Williams’s unsung novel.
Broken statue bust of a Black man.

A Bloody Retelling of 'Huckleberry Finn'

Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’s classic 'Huckleberry Finn' into a tragedy.
Three women standing in front of a 1915 automobile with a suffragist banner hanging on the side.

How Women Used Cars To Fuel Female Empowerment

From a 1915 suffragist road trip to the “First Lady of Drag Racing.”
Tiburcio Parrott sitting holding cane

Birth of the Corporate Person

The defining of corporations as legal “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment rights got a leg up from the fight over a California anti-Chinese immigrant law.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

The Wild History of “Lesser of Two Evils” Voting

For as long as Americans have been subjected to lousy candidates, they’ve been told to suck it up and vote for one of them.
Palestinians gather around a statue of Nelson Mandela after South Africa files a landmark case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Ramallah, Jan. 10, 2024.

1948: Israel, South Africa, and the Question of Genocide

The UN’s failure to dismantle the colonial order foreclosed the application of the Genocide Convention to Israel, South Africa, and the United States.
People walking around buildings destroyed by the Johnstown Flood.

A Flood of Tourism in Johnstown

Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.
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Lessons From the 1964 Republican Convention: Declaring War on the Establishment

Donald Trump’s candidacy wasn’t the first time the Republican Party was split by an outsider declaring war on the establishment elite.
Residents seek higher ground on the roof of a home as floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina cover the streets on Tuesday, August 30, 2005 in New Orleans

How Hurricane Katrina Changed Disaster Preparedness

Hurricane Katrina exposed deep inequities in federal disaster response. "We never felt so cut off in all our lives."
Women rebels in Mexico aim rifles.

Evelyn Trent Was One of America’s Great Revolutionaries

Best remembered as the partner of Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy, Evelyn Trent was an anti-colonial feminist who helped initiate India’s communist movement.
Michael Knott playing guitar

Michael Knott, Who Changed The Course of Christian Rock, Dies at 61

An entire industry wouldn't exist without him, yet few know his name. In his songs, Knott challenged the faithful to examine their faults and hypocrisies.
Indochina Peace Campaign organizers hanging out in Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda's backyard in Santa Monica, California, in 1974.

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, Capitol Hill Antiwar Lobbyists

In 1974, after years of grinding war in Vietnam had exhausted most of the antiwar movement, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda came up with a new strategy.
Willa Cather wearing a mink shawl and a large hat in Paris

Prairie Swooner

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.
A collage of suggestive images of women, a woman holding a camera, and a red letter X.

How Candida Royalle Set Out to Reinvent Porn

As a feminist in the adult-film industry, she believed the answer wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.
Newspaper announcement of the Democratic Antimasonic nomination of William Wirt.
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The Birth of the U.S. Political Convention in 1831

A radical third party had a new idea for selecting a presidential candidate, and it’s still in use today.
Plate of fried chicken, hushpuppies, and a biscuit

The Real History of Hushpuppies

Hushpuppies are delicious, iconically Southern, and no one seems to have a clue where they came from.
Fingerspelling alphabet.

Deafness Is Not a Silence

On the suppression of sign language.
A hand-drawn, slightly abstract image of a pink typewriter, using a QWERTY keyboard.

Page Against the Machine

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Glad to the Brink of Fear

A new biography reveals how Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Americans a vocabulary to understand themselves in an era even more tempestuous than our own.
Oscar Wilde

“A Nation of Lunatics.” What Oscar Wilde Thought About America

On the Irish writer’s grand tour of the Gilded Age United States.
The Branch Davidian compound, Mount Carmel, Waco, Texas.

I Will Give Thee Madonna

Kevin Cook and Jeff Guinn on David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and the 1993 siege of Waco.
Cover of "The Freaks Came Out to Write"

The City in Its Grip: On Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out to Write”

Romano’s book is a vital, comprehensive piece of media scholarship about one of the most influential outlets of the last century. It’s also fun as hell to read.

The Forgotten Lessons of Truly Effective Protest

Organizing is a kind of alchemy: it turns alienation into connection, despair into dedication, and oppression into strength.

UC Berkeley Student Brings to Light Stories of LGBTQ+ Japanese Americans Incarcerated During WWII

A UC Berkeley student’s award-winning research shines a light on LGBTQ+ life in Japanese American concentration camps during World War II.
Title card of the cartoon, featuring FDR committing money to a federal housing program.

The Tragedy and Tenacity of Public Housing in America

A cartoon report on the only policy proven to address the housing shortage and how racism, inept management, and disinvestment led to long-term decline.

The Great American Novels

136 books that made America think.
Cover of "Age of Revolutions" book featuring soldiers' arms raised with swords, pikes, and bayonets.

Generating the Age of Revolutions

Age of Revolutions was happy to interview Nathan Perl-Rosenthal about his new book, entitled 'The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It.'
Tobias Menzies (right) as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in "Manhunt."

The Real History Behind Apple TV+'s 'Manhunt' and the Search for Abraham Lincoln's Killer

A new series dramatizes Edwin Stanton's hunt for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators in the aftermath of the president’s 1865 assassination.
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