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A drawing of Blanche Chesebrough with her husband standing out of frame, his hand on her shoulder.

Escape From the Gilded Cage

Even if her husband was a murderer, a woman in a bad marriage once had few options. Unless she fled to South Dakota.
Person making call in telephone booth.

The Making of the Surveillance State

The public widely opposed wiretapping until the 1970s. What changed?
A still from the 1955 film 'Wiretapper.' The still depicts a man wearing headphones and touching a wire.

When New York City was a Wiretapper’s Dream

Eavesdropping flourished after WWII, aided by legal loopholes, clever hacks, and “private ears”.
Cartoon animation of Beecher with his hand up with a man next to him holding a Holy Bible

When Forgiveness Enables Tyranny: The Unbearable Lightness of Henry Ward Beecher

The most influential preacher in the country, Beecher aggressively agitated for the Union to extend complete forgiveness to Confederates.
Drawing of Transylvania University Medical Department

The Murderous Origins of the American Medical Association

How a bloody gun duel between two doctors in Transylvania sparked a frenzy of outrage—and helped create the American Medical Association.
tintype portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln

The Insanity Trial of Mary Lincoln

How the self-proclaimed "First Widow" used her celebrity to influence public opinion.

The US Tax Code Should Not Allow Billionaires to Exist

The recent ProPublica exposé shows we need to attack the wealth and power of the rich — and that means massively increasing taxes on them.
A comic overview of vaccine development production trials to deliveries.

The Last Time a Vaccine Saved America

Sixty-six years ago, people celebrated the polio vaccine by embracing in the streets. Our vaccine story is both more extraordinary and more complicated.
Annabel Battistella photographed at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C.

Fanne Foxe, ‘Argentine Firecracker’ at Center of D.C. Sex Scandal, Dies at 84

She ran from the car of a powerful congressman and dove into the Tidal Basin in 1974, generating a splash that would ripple into a political cause celebre.
Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros

What Counts, These Days, in Baseball?

As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?

When New Money Meets Old Bloodlines: On America’s Gilded Age Dollar Princesses

The intersecting lives of robber barons and floundering French aristocrats.

The Loser King

Failing upward with Oliver North.

Lovers Under an Apple Tree

Why did the priest and the choir singer die, and what was the nature of their love?

Say It Is So: Baseball’s Disgrace

The case for electing "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and Pete Rose to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Bernie Sanders campaigning
partner

What Winning New Hampshire — and its Media Frenzy — Could Mean for Bernie Sanders

The New Hampshire returns tell us a lot about the leading candidates.
Victoria Woodhull speaks as the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives receives a group of female suffragists, January 11, 1871

The Scandalous and Pioneering Victoria Woodhull

The first woman to run for president was infamous in her day.
Writer Dorothy Parker sitting.

When Dorothy Parker Got Fired from Vanity Fair

Jonathan Goldman explores the beginnings of the Algonquin Round Table and how Parker's determination to speak her mind gave her pride of place within it.

The First Drag Queen Was a Former Slave

William Dorsey Swann fought for queer freedom a century before Stonewall.
Cartoon image of Florida Supreme Court Justices with money, beer cans, and alligators

Judges Gone Wild

Bribery! Impeachment! Drug smuggling! Gambling! Justices getting drunk in the chambers!
U.V.A. Inauguration Day 1921

Jefferson’s Shadow

On the occasion of its bicentennial, and in the wake of racist violence in Charlottesville, UVA confronts its history.

The Grey Gardens of the South

A very real story of southern degradation and decay that made national headlines in the fall of 1932.

To Be Mary MacLane

In the early twentieth century, Mary MacLane’s genre-defying books earned the scorn of critics and the adoration of readers across the nation.

Black Sox Forever

Reflections on the centennial of America’s greatest sports scandal.
Ann Lohman – also known as Madame Restell – in an 1847 edition of the National Police Gazette.

“Immoderate Menses” or Abortion? Bodily Knowledge and Illicit Intimacy in an 1851 Divorce Trial

Edwin Forrest’s 1851 divorce trial.

“Ulysses” on Trial

It was a setup: a stratagem worthy of wily Ulysses himself.

Back When American Fascism Was Bad

On the cancelling of Charles Lindbergh.

Wimbledon’s First Fashion Scandal

100 years ago, a tennis player shocked spectators with her “indecent” dress—not for the last time.

The “Star-Spangled Banner” Hysteria of 1917

The Boston Symphony’s refusal to play the national anthem in its one concerts triggered a xenophobic panic that led an arrest.

The Myth of the Welfare Queen

The right turned Linda Taylor into a bogeyman. But her real life was much more complicated.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.

Information the FBI Once Hoped Could Destroy Martin Luther King Jr. Has Been Declassified

Revealing these materials could be considered “Hoover’s revenge.”

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