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V. Ramirez's Army Corps badge.

How Real ID Excludes Real Americans

My dad’s birth certificate said Vicente. His passport said Vince. New legislation would have disenfranchised him.
by Catherine S. Ramírez via Zócalo Public Square on May 12, 2025
Mexican men in line for work in the Bracero program.
partner

What the World War II-Era Bracero Program Reveals About U.S. Immigration Debates

Efforts to restrict immigration have long coexisted with — and even reinforced — the nation's economic reliance on Mexican laborers.
via Retro Report on May 9, 2025
Brown University women's glee club, including Clara Gomberg, the first Jewish woman to graduate Brown.

“A Jewess Would Not Be Acceptable”

When it came to antisemitism, women’s colleges were no better than the Ivy League.
by Amy Sohn via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on May 8, 2025
Indigenous girl among a line of U.S. peace commissioners.

American History Needs More Names

Identifying Sophie Mousseau from a Civil War-Era photo helps us understand our complex past.
by Martha A. Sandweiss via Zócalo Public Square on April 21, 2025
Painting by Hiroki Kawanabe titled Wide Street.

Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration

Brandon Shimoda’s book about the memorialization of Japanese internment camps also speaks to the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.
by Francisco Cantú via New York Review of Books on April 3, 2025
Children at the Oakland Community School, 1973.

What Happens When the U.S. Declares War on Your Parents?

The Black Panthers shook America before the party was gutted by the government. Their children paid a steep price, but also emerged with unassailable pride.
by Ed Pilkington via The Guardian on March 25, 2025
Graydon Carter sitting next to stacks of ornate, empty chairs.

Vanity Fair’s Heyday

I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what?
by Bryan Burrough via The Yale Review on March 14, 2025
David Levering Lewis and his book overlaid on a stained glass window.

No Nation Under Their Feet

A historian explores his own family's history to understand the African-American community’s internal pigmentocracy and the absurdity of racial binaries.
by David Levering Lewis, Steve Nathans-Kelly via Chicago Review of Books on February 14, 2025
Chinese workers standing in the streets.

The Long Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act

The true cost of the immigration policy can be measured in the generations of Chinese Americans who were never born.
by Jane C. Hu via The New Yorker on January 23, 2025
Home owners Loan Corporation map of Detroit.

Beyond Brown: The Failure of Desegregation in the North and America’s Lingering Racial Fault Lines

On the ongoing legal struggle for educational and racial equality across the United States.
by Michelle Adams via Literary Hub on January 15, 2025
Sound waves.

Listening Devices

The veterans of Kagnew Station saw the early growth of the surveillance state. Has the passage of time given them a new understanding of their work?
by Ann Neumann via The Baffler on January 6, 2025
Harry Truman holding a register to vote sign with three other men.

Politics Is Personal

The 1946 elections were a disaster for Democrats—and the reason I was born.
by Peter Quinn via Commonweal on December 24, 2024
Kimonos hanging on a clothes line at an internment camp.

The Secret History

An investigation of the US’s mass internment of Japanese Americans.
by Harmony Holiday via Bookforum on December 10, 2024
Jade Stevens rests near Lake Putt on land in California’s Tahoe National Forest.

Can Land Repair the Nation’s Racist Past?

California’s approach to Black reparations shifts toward land access, ownership and stewardship.
by Alexis Hunley via High Country News on December 1, 2024
A drawing of the inside of a printing mill, depicting workers printing art.

The Midnight World

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.
by Michael Chabon via New York Review of Books on November 28, 2024
Young people running through the streets of Taipei; a middle aged businessman in Houston.

Texas’ Hotbed of Taiwanese Nationalism

For decades, Houston families like mine have helped keep the flame of independence burning.
by Josephine Lee via The Texas Observer on November 25, 2024
A girl in Native American tribal regalia being crowned as homecoming queen.

The Complex Politics of Tribal Enrollment

How did the U.S. government become involved in “adjudicating Indianness”?
by Rachel Monroe via The New Yorker on November 20, 2024
Men sitting in a bar, drinking and smoking in suits, implied to be members of the Mafia.

How Black Workers Challenged the Mafia

A story of intrigue and power involving union organizers, Black laundry workers, the Mafia, and the FBI in 1980s Detroit.
by Keith Kelleher via The Forge on November 19, 2024
4 photographs of Josie Rudolph Thurnauer through the years 1874-1938.

Josie’s Story: From 19th-Century Sitka To Her Escape From The Holocaust

Josie Rudolph’s life, in an era of worldwide migration and colonial ambition, offers a new perspective on the familiar tale of modern Alaska’s birth.
by Tom Kizzia via Anchorage Daily News on October 28, 2024
A drawing of 10 identical women in historical cooking, but nine of them are colored green and one of them is red.

Anthony Bourdain on the Life and Legacy of a Truly Infamous Cook: Typhoid Mary

“Mary Mallon was a cook. And her story, first and foremost, is the story of a cook.”
by Anthony Bourdain via Literary Hub on October 15, 2024

Eroticize the Hood

A new book revamps Newark's reputation as unsexy, violent, destitute, defiantly declaring it “a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance.”
by José Sanchez via n+1 on October 8, 2024
Mike Dirnt, Billy Joe Armstrong, and Tré Cool from the band Green Day.

How Green Day’s American Idiot Pitted Punk Against George W Bush

Twenty years ago, a trio of Calfornian stoners released a polemic against Republican America that politicised a generation.
by Pippa Bailey via New Statesman on September 30, 2024
Homepage of Freedom Seekers website.

Freedom Seekers: Stories of Black Liberation in the American Revolutionary Era and Beyond

A new digital project shows how those who escaped slavery were important actors in the challenge not just to their own enslavement but to slavery more broadly.
by Billy G. Smith, Simon Newman, Antonio T. Bly, Gloria McCahon Whiting via Commonplace on September 24, 2024
Foggy hills in Appalachia.

Love in the Time of Hillbilly Elegy: On JD Vance’s Appalachian Grift

Justin B. Wymer knows a snake when he sees one.
by Justin B. Wymer via Literary Hub on August 27, 2024
C. G. Garrett photographed with five Black contemporaries outside of a building in Columbia, South Carolina.

Riding With Mr. Washington

How my great-grandfather invented himself at the end of Reconstruction.
by David Nicholson via The American Scholar on August 22, 2024
Fistfight in Peekskill, NY, 1949.

75 Years Ago, the KKK and Anti-communists Teamed Up to Violently Stop a Folk Concert in NY

Racist mobs attacked a 1949 concert in Peekskill, NY, raising anti-communist fervor and showing how hatred could gain legitimacy amid today’s political turmoil.
by Nina Silber via The Conversation on August 20, 2024
Communist Party USA members march for unemployed relief during the Great Depression in San Francisco.

Bring American Communists Out of the Shadows — and Closets

In the 20th century, American Communists were seen as an enemy within. In reality, they were ordinary people with complex lives that deserve to be chronicled.
by David Bacon via Jacobin on August 15, 2024
Old advertisements selling cars to women.

Driving While Female

Is the car our most gendered technology?
by Leann Davis Alspaugh via The Hedgehog Review on July 31, 2024
Portrait of a Black woman; artist unknown, American, circa 1830–1835.

In Search of the Real Hannah Crafts

"The Bondwoman’s Narrative" is the first novel by a Black woman to describe slavery from the inside. Recently, scholars have discovered her true identity.
by Brenda Wineapple via New York Review of Books on July 25, 2024
A French soldier bandaging a wounded Vietnamese comrade.

How the Vietnam War Came Between Two Friends and Diplomats

Bill Trueheart's battles with friend and fellow Foreign Service officer Fritz Nolting illustrate the American tragedy in Southeast Asia.
by Timothy Noah via Washington Monthly on June 24, 2024
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