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McGeorge Bundy with Lyndon Johnson in 1967

American Mandarins

David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?
by Edward Tenner via The American Scholar on March 24, 2022
Book cover of Whole Earth, featuring an image of Stewart Brand backlit and walking through a door, encircled by the earth.

On Floating Upstream

Markoff’s biography of Stewart Brand notes that Brand’s ability to recognize and cleave to power explains a great deal of his career.
by W. Patrick McCray via Los Angeles Review of Books on March 22, 2022
Henry James; illustration by James McMullan

Visions of Waste

"The American Scene" is Henry James’s indictment of what Americans had made of their land.
by Peter Brooks via New York Review of Books on March 3, 2022
Art relating to the News Media by Beck & Stone.

News for the Elite

After abandoning its working-class roots, the news business is in a death spiral as ordinary Americans reject it in growing numbers.
by Mark Hemingway via Law & Liberty on February 14, 2022
Scene from from 'The Gilded Age' in which a wealthy white woman and an African American woman walk in the street, with a stagecoach behind them.

The True History Behind HBO's 'The Gilded Age'

Julian Fellowes' new series dramatizes the late 19th-century clash between New York City's old and new monied elite.
by Kimberly A. Hamlin via Smithsonian on January 20, 2022
Black-and-white image of two men behind bar

The Gilded Age In a Glass: From Innovation to Prohibition

Cocktails — the ingredients, the stories, the pageantry — can reveal more than expected about the Gilded Age.
by Zachary Veith via The Gotham Center on December 28, 2021
Three black students holding hands though the smoke during the Children's Crusade

The Authoritarian Right’s 1877 Project

As the GOP undermines Black political rights in the present, some right-wing intellectuals are rationalizing Black disenfranchisement in the past.
by Eric Levitz via Intelligencer on December 14, 2021

We Can’t Blame the South Alone for Anti-Tax Austerity Politics

The legacy of slavery is often invoked to explain the stunted welfare state. But the strongest resistance to taxation and redistribution came from the Northern ruling class.
by Noam Maggor via Jacobin on November 15, 2021
Old-time black and white pictures of Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir with a modern city background

How American Environmentalism Failed

Traditional environmentalism has lacked a meaningful, practical democratic vision, rendering it largely marginal to the day-to-day lives of most Americans.
by William Shutkin via The MIT Press Reader on August 31, 2021

The Rise of the Elite Anti-Intellectual

For decades, “common sense” has been a convenient framing for conservative ideas. The label hides a more complicated picture.
by Simon Brown via Dissent on August 20, 2021
Students at Colby College

Harvard–Riverside, Round Trip

In the contemporary United States, higher education does more to exaggerate than relieve class and cultural divisions.
by Mitchell L. Stevens via Public Books on August 11, 2021
Two hooded KKK members

The Ku Klux Klan Was Also a Bosses’ Association

The KKK violently resisted the revolutionary gains of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and sought to keep the black masses toiling in submission.
by Chad Pearson via Jacobin on July 27, 2021
Portrait of Thomas Jefferson

Sunrise at Monticello

Jefferson and his connection to partisanship in early America.
by Michael Liss via 3 Quarks Daily on July 19, 2021
Lithograph of a horse and four dead bison on the plains

How Yellowstone Was Saved by a Teddy Roosevelt Dinner Party and a Fake Photo in a Gun Magazine

Teddy Roosevelt made an unlikely alliance with George Bird Grinnell, and together they made efforts to stop poaching and conserve Yellowstone.
by Alan Katz via Smithsonian on July 9, 2021
Book cover of "When Good Government Meant Big Government," with text and red and blue stripes in the style of campaign signs.

When Good Government Meant Big Government

An interview with Jesse Tarbert about the history of the American state, “big government,” and the legacy of government reform efforts.
by Jesse Tarbert via Law & History Review on June 16, 2021
Image of 1896 $1 silver certificate.

Can the 'Tubman Twenty' Help Bring Americans Together?

The new note comes 125 years after the free silver movement tried—and failed—to use currency to forge a national identity.
by Peter W. Y. Lee via Zócalo Public Square on June 9, 2021
Four stars with different designs

How America Fractured Into Four Parts

People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
by George Packer via The Atlantic on June 8, 2021

It’s Time to Break Up the Ivy League Cartel

Democracy requires something more than a handful of super-rich universities.
by Matt Stoller, Sam Haselby via The Chronicle of Higher Education on May 28, 2021
Sketch of late 19th century political rally in NYC

The Forgotten Precedent for Our ‘Unprecedented’ Political Insanity

The decades after the Civil War saw mass participation and mass outrage, followed by a period of orderly reform. What can we learn from that era today?
by Jon Grinspan via Politico Magazine on April 24, 2021
A scientific instrument

How the Sinister Study of Eugenics Legitimized Forced Sterilization in the United States

Audrey Clare Farley on the scientists who weaponized biology.
by Audrey Clare Farley via Literary Hub on April 22, 2021
A man walks amongst deteriorating giant busts of U.S. presidents.

Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class

For more than three centuries, something has been going horribly wrong at the top of our society, and we’re all suffering for it.
by Doug Henwood via Jacobin on April 21, 2021
Vincent Price.

The Strange Undeath of Middlebrow

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
by Phil Christman via The Hedgehog Review on March 25, 2021

The People, It Depends

What's the matter with left-populism? A review of Thomas Frank's "The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism."
by Erik Baker via n+1 on March 24, 2021
Crowd at 2015 Purim Ball in New York City

How New York's 19th-Century Jews Turned Purim Into an American Party

In the 19th century, Purim became an occasion to hold parties to raise money for charities. These parties helped American Jews gain a standing among the elite.
by Zev Eleff via The Conversation on February 23, 2021
A WPA poster styled man in a field with a Mac laptop and earbud instead of farm implements.

The New National American Elite

America is now ruled by a single elite class rather than by local patrician smart sets competing with each other for money and power.
by Michael Lind via Tablet on January 20, 2021
A composite photograph of South Carolina's majority-black legislature created and circulated by opponents of Reconstruction

The Austerity Politics of White Supremacy

Since the end of the Confederacy, the cult of the “taxpayer” has provided a socially acceptable veneer for racist attacks on democracy.
by Vanessa Williamson via Dissent on January 11, 2021
A painting of George Washington during the Whiskey Rebellion.

The Revolutionary Language and Behavior of the Whiskey Rebels

On the continued revolutionary rhetoric and ideology that persisted in America even after the American Revolution.
by Kyler Burd via Journal of the American Revolution on December 10, 2020

Taverns and the Complicated Birth of Early American Civil Society

Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America, embodying both its tumult and its promise.
by Vaughn Scribner via Aeon on November 23, 2020

When New Money Meets Old Bloodlines: On America’s Gilded Age Dollar Princesses

The intersecting lives of robber barons and floundering French aristocrats.
by Caroline Weber via Literary Hub on November 13, 2020
Cover image of "Freedom an Unruly History"

What We Call Freedom Has Never Been About Being Free

The modern conception of freedom emerged as an antidemocratic reaction by elites who wanted to curtail state power.
by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Annelien de Dijn via The Nation on October 29, 2020
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