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Native American ruin.

A 600-Year-Old Blueprint for Weathering Climate Change

During the Little Ice Age, Native North Americans devised whole new economic, social, and political structures.
by Kathleen DuVal via The Atlantic on April 2, 2024
A 9/11 memorial

Relic Steel

After 9/11, hundreds of pieces of steel debris were catalouged. Much of it ended up in small municipal memorials and in other locations around the country.
by Max Holleran, Samuel Holleran via Places Journal on September 1, 2021

The Man Who Created the World Wide Web Has Some Regrets

Tim Berners-Lee has seen his creation debased by everything from fake news to mass surveillance. But he’s got a plan to fix it.
by Katrina Brooker via Vanity Fair on July 1, 2018
State flags in front of a federal building.

Does America Still Do Federalism?

Michael Boskin’s volume gives a grim account of the state of federalism today.
by Tony Woodlief via Law & Liberty on January 13, 2025
A person in Native American regalia looks on at the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Mohawk flags.

How Native Americans Guarded Their Societies Against Tyranny

Native American communities were elaborate consensus democracies, many of which had survived for generations because of careful attention to balancing power.
by Kathleen DuVal via The Conversation on November 5, 2024
Wood engraving of streets and buildings in a city scene.

The World That Municipal Socialists Built

Urban socialists blazed a path toward social democracy. Leftists who want to reclaim this tradition face a whole new set of obstacles.
by Justin H. Vassallo via Dissent on September 5, 2023
Illustration of a soldier in a tank battering through a fiery wooden structure.

A Fire Started in Waco. Thirty Years Later, It’s Still Burning.

Behind the Oklahoma City bombing and even the January 6th attack was a military-style assault in Texas that galvanized the far right.
by Daniel Immerwahr via The New Yorker on May 1, 2023
Painting called "Hudibras’ Discomfiture at the Hands of the Skimmington," by Francis Le Piper, seventeenth century.

American Charivari

The history and context of the made-up aesthetics of the early Ku Klux Klan.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via Lapham’s Quarterly on April 24, 2023
Looney Tunes "That's all Folks" on a TV screen.

HBO Max’s Great Looney Tunes Purge

Hundreds of classic cartoons vanished without warning. How can you raise your kids on favorites you can’t access anymore?
by Sam Thielman via Slate on January 11, 2023
Image of a woman sitting in front of the computer

The Intimate and Interconnected History of the Internet

A new book offers a picture of an early Internet defined by community, experimentation, and lack of privacy. 
by Kevin Driscoll, Jacob Bruggeman via The Nation on October 14, 2022
An art installation that evokes the Hollywood sign with the phrase "Indian Land".

Contest or Conquest?

How best to tell the story of oppressed peoples? By chronicling the hardships they’ve faced? Or by highlighting their triumphs over adversity?
by Daniel Immerwahr via Harper’s on October 11, 2022
Architectural drawing of Boston Harbor from above.

Who Profits?

How nonprofits went from essential service providers to vehicles for programs shaped and approved by capital.
by Justin H. Vassallo via The Baffler on July 25, 2022

Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.
by Ethan Zuckerman via New York Review of Books on May 19, 2022
People collecting sap from trees for maple sugar

Praising Maple Sugar in the Early American Republic

In Early America, some prestigious residents advocated for the replacement of cane sugar, supplied by enslaved workers, with maple sugar from family farms.
by Livia Gershon, Mark Sturges via JSTOR Daily on April 7, 2022
Artists and people sitting on and around a hotel at Woodstock in 1967

The Dropout, a History: From Postwar Paranoia to a Summer of Love

The dropout was not just a hippy-trippy hedonist but a paranoid soul, who feared brainwashing and societal control.
by Charlie Williams via Aeon on December 3, 2021
Drawing of girl raising American flag by Molly Crabapple

Occupy Memory

In 2011, a grassroots anticapitalist movement galvanized people with its slogan “We are the 99 percent.” It changed me, and others, but did it change the world?
by Molly Crabapple via New York Review of Books on September 16, 2021
Photographer Leni Sinclair in a crowd filming an event.

When Detroit Was Revolutionary

In the 1960s and 1970s, photographer Leni Sinclair stood at the center of a local scene where political and cultural ferment merged.
by Leni Sinclair, Billy Anania via Jacobin on July 7, 2021
Picture of a computer.

The Internet Is Rotting

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
by Jonathan Zittrain via The Atlantic on June 30, 2021
A lightbulb with a virus inside

World War II’s Lesson for After the Pandemic

The U.S. needs another innovation dream team.
by Derek Thompson via The Atlantic on June 28, 2021
FDR with eyes crossed out with red line

Is It Time to Cancel FDR?

Today’s progressives are children of the old Republican Party, not the New Deal Democrats. Roosevelt and his followers stood for nearly everything they oppose.
by Michael Lind via Tablet on April 11, 2021
Screenshot of map showing post offices between 1848 and 1895.

Gossamer Network

An interactive digital history project chronicling how the U.S. Post was the underlying circuitry of western expansion.
by Cameron Blevins, Yan Wu, Steven Braun via Northeastern University on March 31, 2021
Deputy sheriff at county fair in Gonzales, Texas.

New Sheriff in Town

Law enforcement and the urban-rural divide.
by Jonathon Booth via The Drift on February 3, 2021
"The Wikipedia Story"

An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia

The definitive story of Wikipedia on its 20th anniversary.
by Tom Roston via OneZero on January 14, 2021
Abstract illustration of life working remotely.

The Perpetual Disappointment of Remote Work

What the troubled history of telecommuting tells us about its future.
by Richard Cooke via The New Republic on January 4, 2021
A graphic for the Federal Theatre Project.

Can We Save American Theater by Reviving a Bold Idea from the 1930s?

The Federal Theatre Project put dramatic artists to work — and we could do it again.
by Wendy Smith via The National Book Review on November 1, 2020
1912 political cartoon of the Aldrich Plan depicted as an octopus with tentacles on a bank, a factory, and a farm while spitting coins into the NYSC.

A Popular History of the Fed

On Populist programs and democratic central banking.
by Noam Maggor, Anton Jäger via Phenomenal World on October 1, 2020

The Forgotten Feminists of the Backlash Decade

The activists of the 1990s worked so diligently that they were written out of history.
by Maggie Doherty via The New Republic on September 24, 2020
Women around a table of papers and forms, with a League of Women Voters banner on the wall.

What the First Women Voters Experienced When Registering for the 1920 Election

The process varied by state, with some making accommodations for the new voting bloc and others creating additional obstacles.
by Meilan Solly via Smithsonian on July 30, 2020
Two posterboards covered in red handprints that read "Black Lives Matter" and "No Justice, No Peace."

Stop Comparing Today’s Protests to 1968

There are superficial similarities, but what we’re seeing now is something completely new.
by Thomas J. Sugrue via Washington Post on June 11, 2020
An row of small suburban houses, with an SUV parked in a driveway and an American flag in the foreground.

Trump Doesn’t Understand Today’s Suburbs—And Neither Do You

Suburbs are getting more diverse, but that doesn't mean they’re woke.
by Thomas J. Sugrue, Zack Stanton via Politico Magazine on June 8, 2020
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