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How Profits From Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston

In a city steeped in history, very few residents understand the powerful legacy of opium money.
Map of the British Colonies in North America between 1763 and 1775.

3 Ways to Think About the American Revolution

The complex combination of grievances that fueled the war had to do with taxes, class, and nationalism.

The North Carolina Trucker Who Brought the World to America in a Box

How Malcolm McClean's shipping containers conquered the global economy by land and sea.

Trump’s Defense of Taking Foreign Money Is Historically Illiterate

The Justice Department lawyers are getting the Founding Fathers all wrong.
WPA poster for the City of New York Department of Docks, showing smokestack of ship and cargo being loaded.
Exhibit

International Trade

Histories of how money and commodities have flowed across borders, from the slave-based economies of maritime empires to contemporary globalization.

The Troubled History of Horse Meat in America

The White House wants to reinstate the sale of horses for slaughter, but eating horse meat has always been politically treacherous.

Policing the Colony: From the American Revolution to Ferguson

King George's tax collectors abused police powers to fill his coffers. Sound familiar?
U.S. soldiers in the Civil War.

Expanding the Slaveocracy

The international ambitions of the US slaveholding class and the abolitionist movement that brought them down.

Recoil Operation

The U.S. has long supplied the world with AR-15 rifles. But only when we see its grim effects at home do politicians call for restricting its sale.
Drawing of Native Americans on a boat

Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America

Michael A. McDonnell’s book is a wonderfully researched microhistory of the Michilimackinac area from the mid-17th to the early 19th century.
Ross Perot speaking in front of a banner opposing NAFTA.

End of the End of History, Redux

Remember Perot?
Map of Mexico
partner

Birth of a Trade War

The Mexican origins of the birth control pill, and the trade dispute with the U.S. it generated.
Marine hospital

Sailors’ Health and National Wealth

That the federal government created this health care system for merchant mariners in the early American republic will surprise many.
Prescott Bush, Dorothy Bush, and George H. W. Bush at the White House.

How Bush's Grandfather Helped Hitler's Rise to Power

Rumors of a link between Prescott Bush and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. They were right.
Photograph of cars bumper to bumper on a highway, USA (year unknown, likely during 1970s energy crisis)

How Congress Planned To Solve The 1970s Energy Crisis

Representative Mo Udall's ambitious strategy to wean the United States off fossil fuels by the year 2000.
Table set with an 18th-century meal of wine, meat, and vegetables.

So Much Madeira

What the Founding Fathers ate—and drank—on July 4, 1777.
A former coal miner works at a computer station at the Bit Source LLC office in Pikeville, Kentucky

The Rise and Fall of the Knowledge Worker

Knowledge workers, were supposed to be the beneficiaries of neoliberalism and globalization until AI and a hypercompetitive employment market.
Declaration of Independence marked up with red marker.

Here Are the Declaration of Independence’s Grievances Against King George III. Many Apply to Trump.

It’s uncanny.
A group of workers in hard hats walk through the shallow water of one of the Panama Canal's locks.

‘The Canal Is Ours’

Trump’s threats to take control of the Panama Canal have precipitated a struggle over the country’s sovereignty.
Image of where the rust belt is located on a US map

Economic Mobility, Not Manufacturing Decline, Is the Real Rust Belt Story

A look at popular interpretations and actual labor fluctuations in the Rust Belt over time.
Charles Sumner

How Charles Sumner Convinced Abraham Lincoln and the Union To Take a Stand Against Slavery

The domestic and international dynamics of the early days of the Civil War.

My Freedom, My Choice

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.
McKinley poster that reads "Prosperity at home, prestige abroad."

Trump, Historians, and the Lessons of U.S. Tariff History

The omissions in Trump's historical narratives reveal how he views national wealth: only the people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder matter.
View of New Amsterdam from the 1620s.

The Dutch Roots of American Liberty

New York would never be the Puritans' austere city on a hill, yet it became America’s vibrant heart of capitalism.
Harvester on farmland.

America’s Pernicious Rural Myth

An interview with Steven Conn about his new book, “Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t.”
French Gen. Jean de Rochambeau and American Gen. George Washington giving the last orders in October 1781 for the battle at Yorktown.

How Allies Have Helped the US Gain Independence, Defend Freedom and Keep the Peace

Why should a country want or need allies? President Donald Trump and his followers seem to disdain the idea. So did George Washington.
Sheet music for W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues, 1925, featuring blue and white images of Louis Armstrong.

Imani Perry’s Blue Notes

Her new book tells the story of Black people through an exploration of the color blue.
Jimmy Carter and General Omar Torrijos shake hands after signing the Panama Canal Treaty in 1977

The Panama Canal Treaty Declassified

Kissinger warned: “This is no issue to face the world on. It looks like pure colonialism.”
A map dedication from Osgood Carlton "to the select men of the town of Boston" in 1795.

Practical Knowledge and the New Republic

Osgood Carleton and his forgotten 1795 map of Boston.
Trump holding a table of tariff rates.
partner

Tariffs Don’t Have to Make Economic Sense to Appeal to Trump Voters

Economists and Democrats dismiss Trump’s tariffs talk at their peril.
Drawing of the Constitutional Convention, by John W. Winkler.
partner

Strange Political Bedfellows

The origins of the Electoral College are entwined with slavery, but not in the way that recent accounts have suggested.

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