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Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth the First's spymaster.

Open to Inspection

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the age of surveillance.
Civil War generals Ambrose Burnside and Robert E. Lee, sporting the substantial beards.
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City Men on the Beard “Frontier”

A brief discussion of the fierce 19th century debates over beards, and how booming American cities created the perfect climate for all that facial hair to grow.
Cover of the U.S. Physical Fitness Program book, featuring silhouettes of people doing calisthenics.
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Run DNC, Run RNC

When the federal government began to claim a stake in the public’s physical fitness, and the origins of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.
A bearded man dressed as a lumberjack with an axe resting on his shoulder.

Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents

One hundred years ago, a crisis in urban masculinity created the lumberjack aesthetic. Now it's making a comeback.

Atomic Anxiety and the Tooth Fairy: Citizen Science in the Midcentury Midwest

How the St. Louis Baby Tooth Study reconciled the ritual of childhood tooth loss with the geopolitics of nuclear annihilation.
A map of Mexico and border states.
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The Fear of “Mexicanization”

The anxiety about “Mexicanization” that ran through Reconstruction-Era politics, as Americans saw disturbing political parallels with their southern neighbor.
Photographer Gordon Parks and Norman Fontanelli, whose family is the subject of Parks's photojournalism.
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Gordon Parks' Diary of a Harlem Family

Narrated photo journal of time spent with a family to discuss poverty and race.
A Farm Security Administration representative visits Seabrook Farms in New Jersey in May 1938.

Destiny of the Dispossessed Spinach Prince

John Seabrook’s history of Seabrook Farms, where many incarcerated Japanese Americans worked during WWII, is ultimately about fathers and sons.
A former coal miner works at a computer station at the Bit Source LLC office in Pikeville, Kentucky

The Rise and Fall of the Knowledge Worker

Knowledge workers, were supposed to be the beneficiaries of neoliberalism and globalization until AI and a hypercompetitive employment market.
A mouse hovers over a screen filled with buttons for purchase choices that all look the same.

Americans Are Tired of Choice

How did freedom become synonymous with having lots of options?
A pride flag framing the US Capitol building.
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The Lavender Scare and the History of LGBTQ Exclusion

The rollback of LGBTQ rights echoes a deeply consequential chapter of American history: the Lavender Scare.
White South Africans who support Donald Trump in front of the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, 2025.
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The History of White Refugee Narratives

The Trump Administration's reasons for resettling Afrikaners echo early U.S. debates about Haiti's independence.
Vintage illustration of three generations of a 1950s American family, sitting in their living room watching television (screen print), 1950.

How Social Reactionaries Exploit Economic Nostalgia

Conservatives think we need traditional hierarchies to reverse social decline; But it’s the economic equality created by strong unions that Americans miss.
Painting of the muse of history.
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So Ductile Is History in the Hands of Man!

The past and present of counterfactual history, from antiquity to the Napoleonic Wars to a few very active subreddits.
Brown University women's glee club, including Clara Gomberg, the first Jewish woman to graduate Brown.

“A Jewess Would Not Be Acceptable”

When it came to antisemitism, women’s colleges were no better than the Ivy League.
Title card for "Legacies of Eugenics" series, with a drawing of a form board for teaching shapes.

Trumpian “Common Sense” and the History of IQ Tests

On the troubling history of IQ tests and special education.
Eugen Sandow flexing his bicep.

The Evolution of the Alpha Male Aesthetic

If you've noticed a certain look common to the manosphere, you're not mistaken. A visual identity has taken hold, with roots that trace back decades.
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 human eyes behind a variety of consumer goods, including milk, shoes, and toothpaste.

The Surprising History of the Ideology of Choice

How endless options became our only option.
Donald Trump and the presidential seal in an empty theater.

The Hoax that Spawned an Age of American Conspiracism

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are just the latest populists to weaponise fears of a sinister “deep state”.
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.
"Rip Van Winkle Awaking from His Long Sleep," painting by Henry Inman (1823).

Bewilderment as a Way of Understanding America’s Present – and Past

Circumstances in which people are feeling extreme disorientation are potent breeding grounds for people who are willing to exploit it in moments of crisis.
An illustration of space, with two silhouettes of heads overlapping.

The Fraught U.S.-Soviet Search for Alien Life

During the Cold War, American and Soviet scientists embarked on an unprecedented quest to contact extraterrestrials.
Newspaper clips depicting opinions on recorded music

When Hollywood Union Members Embraced Artificial Music

In 1929, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) railed against the growing trend of recorded music in movie theaters instead of live musicians.
A painting of George Washington on horseback reviewing the Western Army at Fort Cumberland.
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Merry, Manly Militias

Levity and play — eerily combined with anxiety, terror, and deadly violence — shaped the identity and image of Early Republic militias.
A drawing of a man riding a train and laying down train tracks in front of him.

The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic

You’re passionate. Purpose-driven. Dreaming big, working hard, making it happen. And now they’ve got you where they want you.
Photo of Wong Kim Ark and document about Chinese Exclusion.

History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism

Even Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship has a historical link to the Chinese American experience.
Spock and Kirk in a scene from Star Trek.

Star Trek’s Cold War

While America was fighting on the ground, the Federation was fighting in space.
A painting of a group of Puritans walking through a snowy forest, with the men carrying rifles.

The Puritans Were Book Banners, But They Weren’t Sexless Sourpusses

From early New England to the present day, censors have acted out of fear, not prudishness.

History Teaches …

On being defeated.

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