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Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.).
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Does John Fetterman’s Openness Signal New Acceptance of Mental Illness?

Some see the reaction to Sen. Fetterman’s announcement as a sign of progress, but that’s less true than you might think.
Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln's Great Depression

Abraham Lincoln fought clinical depression all his life. But what would today be treated as a "character issue" gave Lincoln the tools to save the nation.
Painting by Mary Cassatt titled "Mother and Child (Goodnight Hug)".

Beyond “Baby Blues”

“Postpartum depression” encompasses various debilitating changes in mood that can occur after giving birth. How did that language come to be?
Misery and Fortune of Women (1930).

The Lost Abortion Plot

Power and choice in the 1930s novel.
Illustration of McCormick at his desk, hunched over a typewriter.

Hellhounds on His Trail

Mack McCormick’s long, tortured quest to find the real Robert Johnson.
Edna St. Vincent Millay poses for a portrait among magnolia blossoms.

The Wondrous and Mundane Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Her private writing offers another, more idiosyncratic angle to understand the famed poet.
Illustration of Edgar Allen Poe looking out window at raven, painted by Eduard Manet

Edgar Allan Poe Needs a Friend

Revisiting the relationships of “a man who never smiled.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman authored the beloved short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," but also supported eugenics and nativism.
Artistic rendition of a boy with an explosion.

Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?

Their secondhand experience of past horrors can debilitate them.
a artistic human face photo

Bring Back the Nervous Breakdown

It used to be okay to admit that the world had simply become too much.
Ketamine bottles

The Many Lives of Ketamine

Neuroscientist Bita Moghaddam traces the history of ketamine from the battlefield to the dance floor.

William James and the Spiritualist’s Phone

A story of a philosopher, his sister, and belief.

Did Abraham Lincoln’s Bromance Alter the Course of American History?

Joshua Speed found his BFF in Abraham Lincoln.
Mark Twain

The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.
Man working on a farm.

RFK Jr.’s 18th-Century Idea About Mental Health

The health secretary’s clearest plans for psychiatric treatment are a retreat to the past.
William and Henry James.

William and Henry James

Examining the tumultuous bond between the two brothers.
Shulamith Firestone, 1997.

When the Battle's Lost and Won

Shulamith Firestone and the burdens of prophecy.
Dr. Ruth on “Late Night” with David Letterman in 1985.

The Secret That Dr. Ruth Knew

She left exactly when we need her most.
Students in Winnetka, Ill., are checked by a nurses as shown here on return to school following illness. 1947.
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To Address the Teen Mental Health Crisis, Look to School Nurses

For more than a century, school nurses have improved public health in schools and beyond.
Collage of security camera image and newspaper articles from the Columbine shooting.

The Columbine-Killers Fan Club

A quarter century on, the school shooters’ mythology has propagated a sprawling subculture that idolizes murder and mayhem.
Illustration of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, and a cemetery.

‘Live All You Can’

The reflections of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration.
Ivory Perry.

Ivory Perry, the Forgotten Civil Rights Hell-Raiser

Activists are often held up as exemplars of personal morality — but in every social struggle, ordinary people with complex lives rise up as leaders.
Lined-paper illustration of Tom Watson Jr. and Sr.

The Rise and Fall of the ‘IBM Way’

What the tech pioneer can, and can’t, teach us.
Betty Friedan circa 1975.

What Betty Friedan Knew

Judge the author of the “Feminine Mystique” not by the gains she made, but by her experience.
Lou Reed, January 1, 1970.

Lou Reed Didn't Want to Be King

Will Hermes's new biography, "Lou Reed: The King of New York," tries—and fails—to pin the rocker down.
Illustration of a person reading, sitting on a giant stack of books.

Is Writing History Like Solving a Mystery?

Why historians like to think of themselves as detectives.
Connie Converse playing a guitar

The Lost Music of Connie Converse

A writer of haunting, uncategorizable songs, she once seemed poised for runaway fame. But only decades after she disappeared has her music found an audience.
Then–Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama in Mitchell, S.D.

What Does It Take to Win?

A new history of American politics examines the past and future of political realignments.
A lithograph depicting the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s 'The Meritous Price of Our Redemption' by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy.

He Wasn’t Like the Other New England “Witches.” His Story Explains a Lot.

The little-told tale of the 1651 trial of Hugh and Mary Parsons.
Black and white photo of Lydia Maria Child reading a book

Living in Words

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

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