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An illustration featuring a man smoking a cigarette.

When the CIA Was Everywhere—Except on Screen

Hollywood was just fine avoiding all portrayals of the Central Intelligence Agency for years after the agency's founding in 1947.
by Simon WIllmetts, Matthew Wills via JSTOR Daily on April 15, 2021
engraving of a slave ship

Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long?

The history of the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution is a story of sustained efforts to suppress it even as demand for slaves increased.
by James Oakes via New York Review of Books on March 25, 2021
A still from "Judas and the Black Messiah."

The Unsettling Message of ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

The new crime thriller about a magnetic leader of the Black Panther Party is a sharp criticism of the FBI’s surveillance of social movements past and present.
by Elizabeth Hinton via The Atlantic on February 13, 2021
Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl's Anti-Black Racism

The first edition of the beloved novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory featured "pygmy" characters taken from Africa.
by Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily on December 10, 2020
Joseph McCarthy presenting a map.

The Real Legacy of a Demagogue

A new biography of Joseph McCarthy does not reckon with the devastating effects of anti-communism.
by Dan Kaufman via The New Republic on October 2, 2020

A Loyalist and His Newspaper in Revolutionary New York

The story of James Rivington, the publisher who got on the wrong side of the Sons of Liberty.
by Joseph M. Adelman via The Gotham Center on August 25, 2020

Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods

McCarthy never sent a single “subversive” to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on July 27, 2020
Rebecca West.

Whittaker Chambers Through the Eyes of Rebecca West

West understood more clearly than anyone the allure of Communism for educated Westerners.
by Peter Baehr via National Review on April 2, 2020

John Wheeler’s H-bomb Blues

In 1953, as a political battle raged over the US’s nuclear future, the physicist lost a classified document on an overnight train from Philadelphia to DC.
by Alex Wellerstein via Physics Today on December 1, 2019
Jesselyn Radack and Thomas Drake
partner

Do Whistleblower Protections Work? Ask This One.

A case from almost a decade ago reveals the peril faced by whistleblowers seeking to expose wrongdoing.
by Kit R. Roane, Victor Couto via Retro Report on November 19, 2019
Cover of "Cold Warriors" book.

Before Oprah’s Book Club, there was the CIA

‘Cold Warriors’ traces how the U.S. and Soviet government used writers like George Orwell and Boris Pasternak to wage ideological battles during the Cold War.
by Ethan Davison via The Outline on August 26, 2019
Pinkerton detectives.

Who Were the Pinkertons?

A video game portrays the Wild West’s famous detective agency as violent enforcers of order. But the modern-day company disagrees.
by Rebecca Onion via Slate on February 1, 2019
Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson Was Very Nazi

A new biography of the architect shows why it’s hard to ignore the authoritarian characteristics of some of his most celebrated work.
by Armin Rosen via Tablet on December 5, 2018

Diplomatic Back Channels Were Once Seen as a Good Thing

But they've always been risky.
by Steven T. Usdin via TIME on September 4, 2018

Making the Movies Un-American

How Hollywood tried to fight fascism and ended up blacklisting suspected Communists.
by Noah Isenberg via The New Republic on July 3, 2018

An Irrevocable Separation

When the government executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the welfare of their two boys was a secondary concern.
by Robert Meeropol via The Marshall Project on July 2, 2018

The Lynching of Robert Prager

The high-water mark of the anti-immigrant and anti-German hysteria that gripped the nation during World War I.
by Jeff Manuel via We're History on April 5, 2018

Biometric Hand Scans and Reinforced Concrete: The History of the Secret FISA Court

The roots of the influential institution at the center of the Trump-Russia investigation.
by Ian Shapira via Washington Post on February 9, 2018

The Big Picture: Black Women Activists and the FBI

For more than a century, the American government has surveilled and harassed activists from marginalized communities.
by Ashley D. Farmer via Public Books on November 21, 2017
Detail from the Russian poster for the 1957 Polish film Kanal, directed by Andrzej Wajda and set during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Photo by Getty

The Strange Political History of The ‘Underground’

Subterranean metaphors have been a powerful tool of political resistance. Today, is there anywhere left to hide?
by Terence Renaud via Aeon on December 14, 2016

The Curious Death of Oppenheimer’s Mistress

Who killed J. Robert Oppenheimer's Communist lover?
by Alex Wellerstein via Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog on December 11, 2015

Poems of the Manhattan Project

John Canaday's poems look at nuclear weapons from the intimate perspectives of its developers.
via Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on September 30, 2014
Text overlay over a photograph of a WW1 soldier aiming a machine gun over a pile of sandbags.

40 Maps That Explain World War I

Why the war started, how the Allies won, and why the world has never been the same.
by Matthew Yglesias, Zack Beauchamp, Timothy B. Lee via Vox on August 14, 2014
Nuclear weapon mushroom cloud

Mythologizing the Bomb

The beauty of the atomic scientists' calculations hid from them the truly Faustian contract they scratched their names to.
by E. L. Doctorow via The Nation on August 14, 1995
Stokely Carmichael talking to members of the press at the House Rules Committee (1966).

Watching the Watchers

Confessions of an FBI special agent.
by Robert Wall via New York Review of Books on January 27, 1972

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