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US National Guard troops block off Beale Street as Civil Rights marchers wearing placards reading, "I AM A MAN"

The Classical Liberal Foundation of Civil Rights

The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism.
Toni Morrison holding a manuscript.

She Was the Greatest Author of Her Generation. She Should Be Remembered for More Than Her Writing.

Toni Morrison was an editor for 12 years, even as she wrote her own masterpieces. I spoke to her authors about being edited by an icon.
A Freedmen’s Bureau office, Richmond, Virginia, 1866.

One Brief Shining Moment

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.
Kimonos hanging on a clothes line at an internment camp.

The Secret History

An investigation of the US’s mass internment of Japanese Americans.
Tents in Resurrection City in Washington D.C., a protest encampment on the National Mall.

The Poverty of Homeownership

On both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom—even as real estate has proven itself to be relentlessly unequal.
Photo of Kamala Harris speaking at a moderated conversation with Liz Cheney.
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Why People Should Stop Comparing the U.S. to Weimar Germany

Those who draw a line from today to that infamous historical moment when democracy slid into authoritarianism are missing a key difference.
Statue of Jefferson Davis next to other leaders in Statuary Hall in the Capitol.

Many Wealthy Members of Congress are Descendants of Rich Slaveholders

Researchers measured lawmakers’ wealth and found that those whose Southern ancestors owned slaves before abolition have a higher net worth today.
Charles Gates Dawes.
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History Shows How Dangerous 'America First' Really Is

In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. tried America First. This philosophy helped lead to World War II.
Chart of wholesale prices in the UK, showing inflation peaking in 1920.

Dollar Dominance and Modern Monetary Macro in the 1920s

How the U.S. created a new kind of managed and political monetary system in the wake of World War I.
Members of the Mason family, St. Inigoes, Maryland, circa 1890–1909.

How Bondage Built the Church

Swarns’s book about a sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is the legacy of resistance.
Illustration of Nancy and the first edition of the Emancipator.

He Published the First Abolitionist Newspaper in America. He Was Also an Enslaver.

When "The Emancipator" was first published in 1820, its original owner had to answer for why he owned Nancy and her five children.
President Bill Clinton addresses crowd at Waikiki.

An Unrelinquished Claim and Vested Interest

A conversation with John David Waiheʻe III, former Governor of Hawai‘i, on the U.S. apology to the Hawaiian people.
Vice President Joe Biden visits Israel on January 13, 2014.

The Shoah After Gaza

Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built.
Statue of Sojourner Truth.

The Remarkable Untold Story of Sojourner Truth

Feminist. Preacher. Abolitionist. Civil rights pioneer. Now the full story of the American icon's life and faith is finally coming to light.
Commemorative marker about the "Lynching of Howard Cooper."

Efforts to Memorialize Lynching Victims Divide American Communities

Activists around the country are debating the best ways to acknowledge lynchings. But they often meet resistance from local residents — both Black and White.
Carl McIntire reading the Christian Manifesto outside Riverside Church in New York City and on the right, McIntire leaves Riverside Church, where the Christian Manifesto hangs above the doorway.

The U.S. Culture Wars Abroad: Liberal-Evangelical Rivalry and Decolonization in Southern Africa

As evangelicals worked to gain public legitimacy during the Cold War, historians of evangelicalism search for a usable past for their fellow believers.
Leaders of the 1963 March on Washington posing in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Memorial. August 28, 1963.

How the 1619 Project Distorted History

The 1619 Project claimed to reveal the unknown history of slavery. It ended up helping to distort the real history of slavery and the struggle against it.
Deborah Taylor Mapp at her home in the Broad Creek neighborhood of Norfolk, Va.

The Long History of Universities Displacing Black People

The expansion of higher education in Virginia uprooted hundreds of black families.
Painting of the english surgeon Edward Jenner inoculating a child.

How Far Back Were Africans Inoculating Against Smallpox? Really Far Back.

When I looked at the archives, I found a history hidden in plain sight.
Illustration by Kat Brooks of Stephanie Gilbert and her great grandfather Oliver Cromwell Gilbert and his home.

She Cherished the Home Where Her Family Fled Slavery. Then a Stranger Bought It.

Would the new owner of Richland Farm let a Black woman continue to visit to pay tribute to her enslaved ancestors?
A crowd of African Americans watches a group of law enforcement officers.

A Record of Violence

Jim Crow terror, within and outside the law.
California assemblyman and member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe James Ramos, Governor Gavin Newsom, and tribal leaders.

Reclaiming Native Identity in California

The genocide of Native Americans was nowhere more methodically savage than in California. A new state initiative seeks to reckon with this history.
Collage of archival documents, map and landscape photo of homestead site, contemporary homestead site and tree photographs.

The Many Legacies of Letitia Carson

An effort to memorialize the homestead of one of Oregon’s first Black farmers illuminates the land’s complicated history.
Collage of Holmesburg Prison aerial view with a gloved hand picking up a medical vial in the foreground.

Holmesburg Prison's Medical Experiments Are Philadelphia's 'Lasting Shame'

For over 20 years, Dr. Albert Kligman experimented on incarcerated men at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison. Those who profited have yet to redress the harm.
A U.S. Navy training exercise on a beach in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

"I Thought They’d Kill Us": How The US Navy Devastated a Tiny Puerto Rican Island

For decades, the military fired explosives on Vieques. The US citizens who live there still face the consequences.
Howard University students protesting outside the Attorney General’s Conference on Crime held at Memorial Continental Hall, Washington, D.C., December 13, 1934. The four-day conference failed to include lynching in its program.

A Regional Reign of Terror

Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.
For most of her 74 years, Ruth Ann Hills took a certain innocent pride in her family’s story and its place in Staten Island history.  Generations of her family had resided in Mariners Harbor on the island’s North Shore. She and her brother David Thomas live in the house their grandfather built on Van Pelt Avenue. They had found Black ancestors on Staten Island as far back as the 1700s, and incredibly they had all eluded slavery.  Or so Hills thought.   All of that changed one day in 2021, when Hills received a visit from a filmmaker. Heather Quinlan was working on a documentary about a nearby graveyard. Over the course of her genealogical research, Quinlan had discovered that one of the people buried there was Hills’ great-great-great-grandfather.  Neither Hills nor Thomas had ever heard of the man, Benjamin Prine, but his death in 1900 at the age of 106 had been covered by the New York Times and the wire services. Prine, a U.S. veteran of the War of 1812, had been the last enslaved person born on Staten Island, Quinlan told them.  A photograph of a man, seated, holding a cane. The photograph has a long caption beneath, that is headlined "THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME." Hills' and Thomas' great-great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Prine.  Staten Island Historical Society. Prine had once been enslaved by Peter Van Pelt, a highly influential Dutch Reformed Church minister – meaning that the street on which the siblings now live took its name from the same white family that enslaved their ancestor.  “I thought I was a big history buff. ‘Oh, I know about history,’” Hills said. “I guess I was naive.”  A crosswalk scene underneath two large street signs that both read "Van Pelt Av." The intersection of Van Pelt Avenue and Forest Avenue on Staten Island. Reece T. Williams/Gothamist

How the Remains of Formerly Enslaved People Came to Rest Beneath a Staten Island Strip Mall

Benjamin Prine's descendants didn’t know about their family ties – or their connection to his enslaver.
Photo of gate at Harvard University.

Black Students At Harvard Have Always Resisted Racism

Faculty and staff once owned slaves, and professors taught racial eugenics.
A crowd of Japanese Americans behind the barbed wire of an internment camp.
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How a 1944 Supreme Court Ruling on Internment Camps Led to a Reckoning

An admission of wrongdoing from the U.S. government came later, but a Supreme Court ruling had lasting impact.
6 African American's at an Emancipation Day celebration on June 19, 1900

The History of How Emancipated People Were Kept Unfree Needs To Be Remembered Too

Emancipation Days symbolized America’s attempt to free the enslaved across the nation. But those days were unable to prevent new forms of economic slavery.

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