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Colorful rainbow image of a brain.

Mental Illness Is Not in Your Head

Decades of biological research haven't improved diagnosis or treatment. We should look to society, not to the brain.
A woman lights a candle at a memorial for the Buffalo shooting victims, May 2022.
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The Mass Shooting in Buffalo Reflects Deeply Rooted American Ideas

Until we grapple with our history, white supremacist terrorism will keep happening.
Picture of the many different people that make up the US.

The Right to Leave

Thomas Jefferson was a proponent of open migration. But who qualified as a refugee?
Compilation of images: signs at the 1963 March on Washington, poster about censorship, confederate flag, KKK members in hoods, drawing of overseer wielding whip, classroom with portrait of Lincoln on the wall.

Behind the Critical Race Theory Crackdown

Racial blamelessness and the politics of forgetting.
Clockwise from left: William Dawson, Marian Anderson, William Grant Still, Florence Price. Background features the score of Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

Classical Music and the Color Line

Despite its universalist claims, the field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion.
Anthropometric data sheet of Alphonse Bertillon with his picture straight on and in profile

Face Surveillance Was Always Flawed

On the origins, use, and abuse of mugshots.
Dual circular images of fire, representing seeing fire through the eye holes of a klan hood

Sins of the Fathers

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball’s white supremacist great-great-grandfather becomes a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery.
An unkempt cemetery

When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak for the Dead?

Efforts to rescue African American burial grounds and remains have exposed deep conflicts over inheritance and representation.
Portrait of Zalumma Agra.

Circassian Beauty in the American Sideshow

Among P. T. Barnum's “human curiosities” was a supposed escapee from an Ottoman harem, marketed as both the pinnacle of white beauty and an exotic other.
Chinese miners in California

The Anti-Asian Roots of Today’s Anti-Immigrant Politics

Long before Trump, politicians on the country’s West Coast mobilized a white working-class base through violent hate of Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
Cartoon drawing of footprints in sand

Will the Mass Robbery of Native American Graves Ever End?

For centuries, everyone from archaeologists to amateurs pillaged artifacts — and human remains. Now, the FBI is cracking down on those who continue to dig.

Meet Benjamin Banneker, the Black Scientist Who Documented Brood X Cicadas in the Late 1700s

A prominent intellectual and naturalist, the Maryland native wrote extensively on natural phenomena and anti-slavery causes.
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.
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.
Members of the Harvard branch of the KKK pose for 1924 graduation photo at the foot of John Harvard Statue

The Crimson Klan

The KKK was clearly present at Harvard. But the university rarely mentions the 20th century in its attempts to reckon with its past.
profile illustration of human nervous system against black background

The Mystery of ‘Harriet Cole’

Whose body was harvested to create a spectacular anatomical specimen, and did that person know they would be on display more than a century later?
A print featuring fish that look like the American flag.

Propagating Propaganda

Toward the end of WWI, as the U.S. peddled Liberty Bonds, a goldfish dealer bred a stars-and-stripes-colored carp: a living, swimming embodiment of patriotism.
Repairs being made at the site of a water main break
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What Early American Infrastructure Politics Can Teach the Biden Administration

Infrastructure plans are always political. The key is being inclusive and focusing on the public good.
A sign being held at the January 6 Trump rally that depicts Donald Trump holding the head of Karl Marx.

Vikings, Crusaders, Confederates

Misunderstood historical imagery at the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
Political cartoon depicting the menace of monopolies and trusts (1899)

Degeneration Nation

How a Gilded Age best seller shaped American race discourse.
A cemetery.

New Orleans: Vanishing Graves

Holt Cemetery has been filled to capacity many times over; each gravesite has been used for dozens of burials.
Painting of white men taking enslaved Africans off boat on a beach.

Who Owns the Evidence of Slavery’s Violence?

A lawsuit against Harvard University demands the return of an ancestor’s stolen image.

The Empire of All Maladies

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.

Historical Insights on COVID-19, the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and Racial Disparities

Illuminating a path forward.
Silhouetted soldiers with guns in the street at night

The Imperial History of US Policing: An Interview with Stuart Schrader

Dan Berger interviews Stuart Schrader about his new book on US imperialism.
Four people looking at a latrine

The Paradise of the Latrine

American toilet-building and the continuities of colonial and postcolonial development.
Margaret Mead in front of a bookshelf, with a book in hand

How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity

A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?

How a Historian Uncovered Ronald Reagan’s Racist Remarks to Richard Nixon

In a taped call with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan described the African delegates to the United Nations in luridly racist terms.
Unidentified African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters.

Race in Black and White

Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.
Hands waving US and pride flags during the National LGBT Anniversary Ceremony in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, 2015.
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How Eugenics Gave Rise To Modern Homophobia

The roots of anti-gay attitudes lay in white supremacy.

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