Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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Protestors at the Global Climate Strike in London, March 2019.

Why Everyone Hates White Liberals

1988 was a pivotal year in how “white liberals” are perceived by their fellow Americans.
A naked woman bathes.

How the Hays Code Took the Sex Out of Hollywood

A group of early 20th-century Catholics sought to impose their standards of morality onto the growing and scandal-ridden Hollywood film industry.
Advertisement highlighting recipes to make with Seabrook frozen vegetables.

Decline and Fall of the Spinach Kings: On the Wilting of a Family Dynasty

A history of wealth, enterprise, and family dysfunction.
A collage of men with different hairstyles.

Bad Curls, Bad Character

The charged meaning of hair in 19th-century America.
Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.

States’ Rights to Racism

On the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, racism, and federal power.
Book cover for The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram features a phone cord snaking around text.
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Irrelevant at Best, or Else Complicit

The state of design in 1970.
Amelia Earhart and her husband.

Amelia Earhart’s Reckless Final Flights

The aviator’s publicity-mad husband, George Palmer Putnam, kept pushing her to risk her life for the sake of fame.
A raccoon leaning against wood.

The Fascinating History of Raccoons in North American Culture, From Symbols to Pets to Dinner

In the relationship between humans and raccoons, the black-masked mammals have played many roles.
Avocados

Why Are We So Obsessed With Avocados?

Why are avocados everywhere?
Photos of William F. Buckley and James Baldwin.

When William F. Buckley Jr. Met James Baldwin

In 1965, the two intellectual giants squared off in a debate at Cambridge. It didn’t go quite as Buckley hoped.
Cover of "Sedition" featuring smoke engulfing the Capitol dome.
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An Attempt to Defeat Constitutional Order

After the Civil War, conservatives used terrorism, cold-blooded murder, and economic coercion to fight the new state constitution in South Carolina.
Women pilots in front of a plane.

How a Group of Fearless American Women Defied Convention to Defeat the Nazis

On the “Atta-Girls,” the pilots who chased adventure during the Second World War.
The Young Lords in New York, 1969-1976.

How New York City’s Radical Social Movements Gave Rise to Hip-Hop

The revolutionary history behind one of America’s main musical exports.
Drawing of cowboys riding in the desert, guns drawn, while a herd grazes.

The Hell We Raised: How Texas Shaped the Gunfighter Era

Texans left an enduring mark on the gunfighter era. The frontier was a darker place because of it.
African American baseball team photo.

How Baseball Shaped Black Communities in Reconstruction-Era America

On the early history of Black participation in America's pastime.
Lethal injection table.
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Lethal Injection Is Not Based on Science

The history of the three-drug combo used in death-penalty executions. 
rattlesnake

How the Rattlesnake Almost Became an Emblem of a Nascent America

On the centuries-long historical evolution of a serpentine symbol.
Lt. Selfridge and Mr. Wright stepping into the Wright aeroplane at Fort Myer, Virginia.

Uh-Oh

“When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash.”
John Quincy Adams
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Are You Not Large and Unwieldy Enough Already?

John Quincy Adams challenges the idea of an expanding American frontier. 
Chinese migrants wrapped in blankets on a beach, from the cover of "Camp of the Saints."
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Mutant Capitalism

How the dystopian visions of the nativist right are in keeping with a long tradition of neoliberal ideology.
Cartoon drawing of a child hiding behind a man.

How Robert Crumb Channeled Mid-Century Teenage Angst Into Art

Dan Nadel on the formative awkward adolescence of an iconic American cartoonist.
A drawing of cannons being fired at Fort Sumter.

What Can We Learn From the Jewish Debate Over Slavery?

This Passover, American Jews should embrace the fight for “emancipation of all kinds.”
Headshots of Charles Murray, Friedrich Hayek, and Elon Musk in front of a red backgrounds.

Free Markets and Fixed Natures

How neoliberals fell in love with “human nature”—the glue that still unites the divergent factions of the new right.
Ryan White

The True Story of an Indiana Teen Barred From School Over His AIDS Diagnosis

Ryan White changed perceptions of the disease in the United States.
William and Henry James.

William and Henry James

Examining the tumultuous bond between the two brothers.
Leonard Bernstein practices with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1967.

How Leonard Bernstein Changed the Canon

In 1966, the conductor arrived in Vienna with a mission: to restore Gustav Mahler’s place in 20th-century music.
A woman at a toy counter.
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“The End Is Coming! The End Is Coming!”

In the 1990s, an entire industry was born of trying to convince Americans that Beanie Babies were a great investment opportunity.
A group of Mexican nationals boarding a bus for repatriation to Mexico from the United States.
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Scared Out of the Community

In the 1930s, approximately half a million Mexicans left the United States. Many families had American-born children to whom Mexico was a foreign land.
Military patients in an emergency hospital at Camp Funston, Kansas, 1918.

How the Industrialization and Militarism of the Early 1900s Helped Spread the Spanish Influenza

The public and private battles waged across Europe and the United States during the 1918 flu pandemic.
Black and white Washington DC.

Between Existential Fear and Isolationist Exhaustion: The United States on the Eve of the Cold War

Dean Acheson, President Truman’s prim, patrician undersecretary of state, was sitting in his office on February 21, 1947, when he received a visitor.
Francis Townsend
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Creating the “Senior Citizen” Political Identity

On the movement that fought for old-age pensions during the Great Depression.
A crowd of Black children walking into school.

How Delayed Desegregation Deprived Black Children of Their Right to Education

On the ongoing battle to desegregate schools across America throughout the 1960s.
A drawing of a ship firing cannons at another vessel.

On the Colonial Power Struggle That Would Give Birth to the City of New York

For historian Russell Shorto, it was all about water.
A woman with a rifle, superimposed on an American flag.

From Philly to Derry: On the Americans Who Armed the IRA During The Troubles

Vincent Conlon’s secret life in the United States as an operative and gun-running Irish rebel.
Slave auction in the United States.

How a Group of 19th-Century Historians Helped Relativize the Violent Legacy of Slavery

On the scholarship and intellectual legacies of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, William Dunning and other academics.
Shackles with a magnifying glass on the end.

How the Study of Slavery Has Shaped the Academy

Who decides how history gets written?
Collage of Chinese laborers.

When an American Town Massacred Its Chinese Immigrants

In 1885, white rioters murdered dozens of their Asian neighbors in Rock Springs, Wyoming. 140 years later, the story of the atrocity is still being unearthed.
Clarence Bouldin, a muscular wrestler.

The Curious Case of Clarence Bouldin

Was the pro wrestler known as “the Cuban Wonder” really the first Black world champion?
Ronald Reagan standing before a podium and a row of American flags.

The Rise of Ronald Reagan, a Product of California

On the early career of the actor-cum-politician who changed America.
Arthur Morgan from video game Red Dead Redemption 2 sporting a gun and cowboy hat.

Cult of the Cowboy: Inside the Toxic Adoration of an All-American Obsession

Video games, violence and the enduring allure of the vigilante hero.
A rally for civil rights outside of the 1964 Republican National Convention.
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“A Party for the White Man”

The scene at the 1964 Republican National Convention, when Barry Goldwater was nominated and black Republicans’ worst fears about their party were confirmed.
Vladimir Putin's eyes revealed from behind torn paper.

How America Wasted Its Most Powerful Economic Weapon

If world leaders had been clearer about the sanctions Putin would face, they might have deterred his invasion of Ukraine.
Supreme court passing from the robing room to the court chambers, 1881.
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Lacking a Demonstrable Source of Authority

On the case that provoked the courts to decide if the federal government had jurisdiction to exercise American criminal law over Native peoples on Native lands.
A group of Pilgrims in prayer.

How the Pilgrims Redefined What It Means to Move Across the World

The Puritan origins of modern ideas about migration.
Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln's Duel

In the summer of 1842, young Abraham Lincoln’s razor-sharp wit almost got him into a whole heap of trouble.
Cover of The Moving Image by Peter Kaufman.

The Power of the Moving Image

Video has become our dominant cultural medium, yet we lack reliable archives for the audiovisual record.
illustration of stack of books
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The Rise and Fall of Liberal Historiography

How historians changed their approach, from the 1960s to the present.
A moving truck on cinder blocks.

How Progressives Froze the American Dream

The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.
A drawing of Confederate soldiers on horseback violently forcing Black people to walk south.

After Confederate Forces Took Their Children, These Black Mothers Fought to Reunite Their Families

Confederates kidnapped free Black people to sell into slavery. After the war, two women sought help from high places to track down their lost loved ones.
Three identical pictures of the explosion of an atomic bomb with different coloring.

How Literature Predicted and Portrayed the Atom Bomb

On Pierrepoint B. Noyes, H.G. Wells, and the “Superweapons” of early science-fiction.
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