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Photo of Danyel Smith.

Danyel Smith Tells the History of Black Women in Pop Music

The author discusses Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight, racism in magazines, and why she’s so hopeful for the future of music and writing.
by Emily J. Lordi, Danyel Smith via The New Yorker on April 17, 2022
An image of red slave shackles.

Tracing the Ancestry of the Earliest Enslaved Ndongo People

A story born in blood.
by Clyde W. Ford via Literary Hub on April 8, 2022
The site in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964.

Burying a Burning

The killing of three civil-rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964 changed America.
by Ko Bragg via The Atlantic on April 7, 2022
Illustration of a giant tree in a swamp

The Hidden and Eternal Spirit of the Great Dismal Swamp

For nearly all of its modern existence, the Great Dismal Swamp has been excluded from U.S. history. Now there’s a push to bring its significance to light.
by Lex Pryor via The Ringer on March 30, 2022
Cartoon illustration featuring Pauline Hopkins (center), Booker T. Washington (left), and John C. Freund (right)

Contending Forces

Pauline Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Fight for The Colored American Magazine.
by Tarisai Ngangura via The Believer on March 29, 2022
Photograph of John Gunther, an American journalist.

The Book That Unleashed American Grief

John Gunther’s “Death Be Not Proud” defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.
by Deborah Cohen via The Atlantic on March 8, 2022
Photograph of horse and buggy carrying Black family migrating North

A Brief History of the Great Migration, when 6 Million Black People Left the South

The Great Migration in the 20th century changed the face of America. For the past few decades, it's been reversing.
by Jalyn Henderson via NBCLX on February 28, 2022
Collage of photos: author's grandfather, Shigeki, in his army uniform; his house; an internment camp.

My Family Lost Our Farm During Japanese Incarceration. I Went Searching for What Remains.

When Executive Order 9066 forcibly removed my family from their community 80 years ago, we lost more than I realized.
by Ruth Chizuko Murai via Mother Jones on February 18, 2022
Rose Dougan at the Wright School of aviation in 1915

Flying Rose Dougan: On the Trail of Native American Art

Uncovering the life of Rose Dougan, a real Renaissance woman, and her pioneering role in preserving Native American art.
by Ann Japenga via California Desert Art on February 8, 2022
“Our first camp.” Vado de Piedra, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 26, 1921.

The Photo Album That Succeeded Where Pancho Villa Failed

The revolutionary may have tried to find my grandfather by raiding a New Mexico village—but a friend’s camera truly captured our family patriarch.
by Stacey Ravel Abarbanel via Zócalo Public Square on February 2, 2022
Black and white photograph of Lorraine Hansberry smoking a cigarette.

The Many Visions of Lorraine Hansberry

She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?
by Blair McClendon via The New Yorker on January 17, 2022
Black and white photograph of Lucille Clifton.

Lucille Clifton and the Task of Remembering

The poet’s memoir Generations is both a chronicle of her ancestral lineage and lesson in the centrality of Black women to the story of American history.
by Marina Magloire via The Nation on January 12, 2022
Drawing of Asian Americans on an urban river boardwalk.

Return Flights

The memoirs of Korean adoptees, once full of confession and confusion, are now marked by confidence and rage.
by E. Tammy Kim via New York Review of Books on December 23, 2021
Image of an Asian American face obscured by visual effect that it has been sliced and distorted

Searching for Coherence in Asian America

In “The Loneliest Americans,” Jay Caspian Kang asks whether Asian American identity can be rescued from people like him.
by Marella Gayla via The New Yorker on October 20, 2021
A bullet whose path makes an audio file.

What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban

I spent 600 hours listening in on the people who now run Afghanistan. It wasn’t until the end of my tour that I understood what they were telling me.
by Ian Fritz via The Atlantic on August 19, 2021
Collage of audio-related images, records, cassettes, CDs, wav files, ipods, electronic media icons, and an ear.

What Will Happen to My Music Library When Spotify Dies?

If your entire collection is on a streaming service, good luck accessing it in 10 or 20 years.
by Joe Pinsker via The Atlantic on July 19, 2021
A woman posing with an elk she shot.

A Woman’s Intimate Record of Wyoming in the Early Twentieth Century

Lora Webb Nichols created and collected some twenty-four thousand negatives documenting life in her small town.
by Sarah Blackwood via The New Yorker on July 18, 2021
The Borden family in 1923

The Dust of Previous Travel

After inheriting a box of documents from her grandfather, Marta Olmos learns more about her family's history.
by Marta Olmos via Contingent on June 27, 2021
Laundresses with Union soldiers, circa 1863.

On Juneteenth, Three Stirring Stories of How Enslaved People Gained Their Freedom

Millions of Americans gained freedom from slavery in a slow-moving wave of emancipation during the Civil War and in the months afterward.
by Gillian Brockell via Washington Post on June 19, 2021
Dr. Lawrence Matsuda portrait, 2015, Painting by Alfredo M. Arreguin

Japanese Internment, Seattle in the 50s, and the First Asian-American History Class in Washington

Lawrence Matsuda talks about his family history, his experiences of discrimination, and his work in bilingual and Asian American representation in education.
by Lawrence Matsuda, Casey McNerthney via History Link on June 16, 2021
Collage of demonstrators, boots, jeans, and a van

The Incredible True Adventure of Five Gay Activists in Search of the Black Panther Party

Communes, free love, coming out, getting arrested, consciousness-raising rap sessions, gun shooting, acid dropping, and trying to be macrobiotic at McDonald’s.
by Hugh Ryan via Harper's Bazaar on June 8, 2021

The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized

An infamous Republican political operative’s unpublished memoir shows how the Party came to embrace lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost.
by Jane Mayer via The New Yorker on May 6, 2021
Henry Adams and his wife, Clover Adams at Wenlock Abbey, England, 1873

A Posthumous Life

Family blessings are a curse, or they can be. The life of Henry Adams explained in his book Education.
by Brenda Wineapple via New York Review of Books on April 8, 2021
2020 time capsule with a roll of toilet paper, mask, hourglass, and syringe

The Things They Buried: Masks, Vials, Social-Distancing Signage — And, of Course, Toilet Paper

Most Americans are eager to forget 2020. But some are making time capsules to make sure future generations remember it.
by Maura Judkis via Washington Post on March 25, 2021
Illustration of Pimento Cheese on Bread by Carter.

Pimento-cracy

The history of pimento cheese as a working class fixture and a symbol of Southern culture as seen through mystery novels.
by Cynthia R. Greenlee via Oxford American on March 23, 2021
Still life painting, “Early American, Apples in a Porcelain Basket” (2007), by Sharon Core.

After Apple Picking

The decline of South Carolina's apple industry, interwoven with personal memories of family orchards.
by Mark Powell via Oxford American on March 23, 2021
A boy surfs on a computer keyboard surrounded by details from earlier internet eras.

You Probably Don’t Remember the Internet

How do we memorialize life online when it’s constantly disappearing?
by Kaitlyn Tiffany via The Atlantic on March 22, 2021
Two characters in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, one rabbit and one human.

Archivists Are Trying to Chronicle Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ Unforgettable First Year

The challenge of documenting a virtual world.
by Jay Castello via The Verge on March 16, 2021
John Ossoff.

The Politics of Nostalgia

Nostalgia is not merely reductive; it is also productive.
by Rachel B. Gross via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on February 2, 2021
A mural of a woman cleaning a turnstile.

How to Remember a Plague

2020 was full of efforts to archive photos and artifacts of the pandemic — an impulse born of a sense of witnessing history, and a desire to speak to the future.
by Laura Bliss via CityLab on December 31, 2020
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