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Marian Anderson studying a musical score with the pianist Kurt Johnen, Berlin, 1931

Black Voices, German Song

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?
Painting of events and characters in the book Bambi, with a scared deer surrounded by violent acts of a person and dog hunting and predators capturing and eating prey.

“Bambi” Is Even Bleaker Than You Thought

The original book is far more grisly than the beloved Disney classic—and has an unsettling message about humanity.
Painting of an airship flying over a rural countryside.
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Whatever Happened to Airships?

In moving away from fossil fuels, some in aviation are thinking of bringing back helium-assisted flight.
Geneticist Hermann Muller and his electronic equipment.

The Big ‘What If’ of Cancer

How a feisty, suicidal Nobel laureate infuriated both Hitler and Stalin, and stalled cancer research for fifty years along the way.
Public Broadcasting Service logo

Epistemic Crises, Then And Now: The 1965 Carnegie Commission As Model Philanthropic Intervention

How the commission that led to the creation of the U.S.’s public television and radio systems can serve as a model for countering disinformation today.
Pure athletic prowess wasn’t really the point—the People’s Olympiad was about cultivating a spirit of equality, in direct contrast to Nazi ideals.

The 'Protest' Olympics That Never Came to Be

A leftist response to the 1936 Games being held in Nazi Germany, the proposed competition was canceled by the Spanish Civil War.

The Pantomime Drama of Victims and Villains Conceals the Real Horrors of War

Innocent, passive, apolitical: after the Holocaust, the standard for ‘true’ victimhood has worked to justify total war.
Lady Liberty bust in a park.

The Entwined History of Freedom and Racism

Liberty for some has always entailed a lack of liberty for many others.
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.
A mosaic of freedom and associated ideas

How Americans Lost Their Fervor for Freedom

The New Yorker critic's new book is a sequel of sorts to "The Metaphysical Club."
Paul Peter Porges with self-portrait, during his time in the US army, 1951-52.

‘They Were Survivors’: The Jewish Cartoonists Who Fled the Nazis

A new exhibition celebrates the work of three Austrian artists who escaped their country as Nazis took over and created daring work in the years after.
Text that says "Can a font be racist?" in the font "Won Ton."

Karate, Wonton, Chow Fun: The End of 'Chop Suey' Fonts

For years, the West has relied on so-called 'chop suey' fonts to communicate "Asianness" in food packaging, posters and ad campaigns.
Artwork depicting The Statue of Liberty's back.

America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses

The U.S. is a diverse nation of immigrants—but it was not intended to be, and its historical biases continue to haunt the present.
Two people speaking together across a border.

The Competing Visions of English and Esperanto

How English and Esperanto offer competing visions of a universal language.
Old Bay Seasoning

The Jewish Roots of Old Bay Seasoning

Oy Bay! Become seasoned on the history of America's beloved spice blend.
Tyler Stovall and his book

The History of Freedom Is a History of Whiteness

A conversation about whether or not the legacy of liberty can break away from racial exclusion and domination.
Benito Mussolini.

The Americans Who Embraced Mussolini

As we confront rightwing extremism in our own time, the history of American fascist sympathy reveals a legacy worth reckoning with.
A screencap from Looney Tunes featuring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

Hungry Like the Rabbit

On the HBO Max streaming service, with their skipped numbers, the episodes omitted from the 31 seasons of Looney Tunes are easy to spot.
Black man drinking from a segregated water fountain.

Caste Does Not Explain Race

The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.

The World Henry Ford Made

A new history charts the global legacy of Fordist mass production, tracing its appeal to political formations on both the left and the right.
Protesters opposing ICE detention camps.
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The History of Eugenics in the U.S. Has Made Migrant Women Vulnerable

Marginalized women of color have long seen their reproductive freedom limited.
A parade of people carrying American flags and Nazi Germany flags, black and white, New York 1937.

Operation Paperclip and Nazis in America

The two decades leading up to WWII featured numerous connections between America and Nazi Germany that reveal Nazism was never simply a foreign or enemy force.
Still from "Apocolypse Now"

How a Wagner Opera Defined the Sound of Hollywood Blockbusters

“Ride of the Valkyries” has been featured in hundreds of films, including 'The Birth of a Nation,' 'Jarhead,' and most famously, Apocalypse Now.'

The Evolution of 'Racism'

A look at how the word, a surprisingly recent addition to the English lexicon, made its way into the dictionary.

Pulling Down Our Monuments

The Sierra Club's executive director takes a hard look at the white supremacy baked into the organization's formative years.
A close-up of an African-American woman's face and hair

On Liberating the History of Black Hair

Emma Dabiri deconstructs colonial ideas of Blackness.
Youth members of a German-American Bund camp raising a flag, 1934.

American Fascism: It Has Happened Here

Americans of the interwar period were perfectly clear about one fact we have lost sight of today: all fascism is indigenous, by definition.

The Fall and Rise of the Guillotine

Ideologues of left and right have learned to stop worrying and love rhetorical violence.

The Defender of Differences

Three new books consider the life, and impact, of Franz Boas, the "father of American cultural anthropology."

The First Lady of American Journalism

Dorothy Thompson finds a room of her own.

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