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Bus station with 'colored waiting room' sign.

Plessy v. Ferguson at 125

One hundred and twenty five years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, there are still lessons to be gleaned from the case.
Illustration by Valerie Chiang; Source text from PBS; Library of Congress; Source photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston / Library of Congress / Corbis / Getty (children); Getty (other)

The Forgotten History of the Campaign to Purge Chinese from America

The surge in violence against Asian-Americans is a reminder that America’s present reality reflects its exclusionary past.
Asian-American men waiting to be questioned by white police officers

Racism Has Always Been Part of the Asian American Experience

If we don’t understand the history of Asian exclusion, we cannot understand the racist hatred of the present.
The Amistad slave ship

Birthright Citizenship, Slave Trade Legislation, and the Origins of Federal Immigration Regulation

Opponents of birthright citizenship say there weren't any “illegal aliens” when the 14th Amendment was drafted. They're wrong.
Exhibit

“All Persons Born or Naturalized in the United States...”

A collection of resources exploring the evolving meanings of American citizenship and how they have been applied -- or denied -- to different groups of Americans.

Artwork depicting The Statue of Liberty's back.

America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses

The U.S. is a diverse nation of immigrants—but it was not intended to be, and its historical biases continue to haunt the present.
Photographs from Tulsa shaped into a three-dimensional sculpture.

The Unrealized Promise of Oklahoma

How the push for statehood led a beacon of racial progress to oppression and violence.
Illustration of a gavel by Vahram Muradyan

Why Do Americans Have So Few Rights?

How we came to rely on the courts, instead of the democratic process, for justice.
Headshot of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass and the American Project

It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.
Census taker's bag from 1980

Immigration Hard-Liner Files Reveal 40-Year Bid Behind Trump's Census Obsession

The Trump administration tried and failed to accomplish a count of unauthorized immigrants to reshape Congress, the Electoral College and public policy.
Book cover for The Two Faces of American Freedom

The Two Faces of American Freedom, Ten Years Later: Part One

On the ten year anniversary of Aziz Rana's book, Henry Brooks interviews him on his influential book and what it might teach us about the legacies of populism.

‘America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument

Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it.
Photograph of people lining up to hear arguments in Brown v. Board of Education.

The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It

The Supreme Court, the federal branch with the least public accountability, has historically sided with tradition over more expansive human rights visions.
partner

Suppressing Native American Voters

South Dakota has been called "the Mississippi of the North" for its long history of making voting hard for Native Americans.

What Right to Vote? There’s a Lie at the Heart of American Democracy

The centennial of women’s suffrage which guaranteed all women the right to vote — has a lie at its very core.
Painting of a worried child and a despairing mother.

With Friends Like These

On early American attempts to kick out foreigners.

Racist Litter

A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.
Demonstrators with signs reading "Every Person Counts."
partner

Trump’s Push to Skew the Census Builds on a Long History of Politicizing the Count

Who counts determines whose interests are represented in government.
Covers of issues of One magazine, featuring line drawings and article titles including "I am glad I am homosexual," and "I Just Had to Write".
partner

ONE: The First Gay Magazine in the United States

ONE is a vital archive, but its focus on citizenship and “rational acceptance” ultimately blocked it from being the safe home for all that it claimed to be.
An outline of the United States filled with black figures who are outlined by a continuous white line.

"Other": A Brief History of American Xenophobia

The United States often touts itself as a "nation of immigrants," but this obscures the real story.

Will We Still Be American After Democracy Dies?

Is being "political" the central force in our identities?
partner

"It Has Not Been My Habit to Yield"

Charles Sumner and the fight for equal naturalization rights.
Lithograph of a Black man appealing to liberty and justice.

Dreams of a Revolution Deferred

How African-Americans in Early America celebrated the Declaration of Independence's ideals, even as basic freedoms were denied to them.
Painting of a sinking ship on fire, in which the fire looks like the American flag.

The Confederate Project

What the Confederacy actually was: a proslavery anti-democratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.
Stamp celebrating women's suffrage in the Philippines.

Votes for Colonized Women

How the politics of American imperialism often intersected with calls for women's suffrage.
Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
partner

The West Is Relevant to Our Long History of Anti-Blackness, Not Just the South

Revisiting the Missouri Compromise should transform how we think about white American expansion.

Will This Year’s Census Be the Last?

In the past two centuries, the evolution of the U.S. Census has tracked the country’s social tensions and reflected its political controversies.
Workers among stacks of paper in the U.S. Census Bureau.

100 Years Ago, Congress Threw Out Results of the Census

The results of the 1920 census kicked off a bitter, decadelong political squabble. Could the same happen again in 2020?

The Achievements, and Compromises, of Two Reconstruction-era Amendments

While they advanced African American rights, they had serious flaws, Eric Foner writes.
Political cartoon about Reconstruction.

The Buried Promise of the Reconstruction Amendments

The historical context of the amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War, Eric Foner argues, are widely misunderstood.
Illustration of white Quakers with enslaved Africans in the background.

Slavery in the Quaker World

Christian slavery and white supremacy.

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