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Still from the 2023 indie film "Late Night with the Devil"

The Role of Talk Shows in Sensationalizing the Satanic Panic of the 1980s

"Late Night with the Devil," a “found footage” horror film, perfectly captures the mood and style that surrounded media depictions of the occult in the 1970s.
by Joseph Laycock via Religion Dispatches on March 26, 2024
Digital illustration of a wagon filled with newspapers.

Fear in the Heartland

How the case of the kidnapped paperboys accelerated the “stranger danger” panic of the 1980s.
by Paul M. Renfro via Slate on August 9, 2021
Cover of John Krakauer's book "Under the Banner of Heaven," featuring the Utah landscape.

Abusing Religion: Polygyny, Mormonisms, and Under the Banner of Heaven

How stories of abuse in minority religious communities have influenced American culture.
by Megan Goodwin via The Revealer on February 20, 2019
A portrait of a woman in an crime pamphlet labeled "the beautiful victim."
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The Bloody History of the True Crime Genre

True Crime is having a renaissance with popular TV series and podcasts. But the history of the genre dates back much further.
by Pamela Burger, Jack Miles, Joy Wiltenburg, Frederick Burwick, Karen S. H. Roggenkamp via JSTOR Daily on August 24, 2016

By Which Melancholy Occurrence: The Disaster Prints of Nathaniel Currier, 1835–1840

Why Americans living in uncertain times bought so many sensational images of shipwrecks and fires.
by Genoa Shepley via Panorama on October 14, 2015
A collage of censored obscenities and the front page of the Dartmouth Review.

Before Trump, and Before the Young Republicans, There Was the Dartmouth Review

Long before Trump, a group of Dartmouth students weaponized outrage and satire to seize the spotlight.
by Rich Barlow via Politico Magazine on October 21, 2025
Richard Harding Davis.

How America’s First Star War Reporter Set the Tone For a Century of Journalism

Unpacking the sensationalist, and occasionally biased, work of Richard Harding Davis.
by Peter Maass via Literary Hub on October 9, 2025
William F. Buckley Jr. (far right) with his brother, New York senator James L. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and Barry Goldwater at National Review’s twentieth-anniversary celebration, New York City, November 1975

Conservatism’s Baton Twirler

A Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and colleges should be understood as the culmination of William F. Buckley conservative movement.
by Osita Nwanevu via New York Review of Books on September 2, 2025
Art work of a hand holding Mars by string in the midst of the universe.

The Long History of Life on Mars

A new book explores how Americans came to believe in an advanced Martian civilization at the turn of the twentieth century.
by Jon Allsop via The New Yorker on August 29, 2025
Octopus like arms, holding a stack of newspapers.

The Birth of the Attention Economy

The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century remade how Americans engaged with the world.
by Jake Lundberg via The Atlantic on July 31, 2025
Silhouette of a man with smokestack smoke entering his brain.

Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers?

Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.
by Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker on June 25, 2025
A cartoon depicts two bandaged men suspended on the scales of justice raising their fists at each other.

Jack London’s Fantastic Revenge

In his short story “The Benefit of the Doubt,” Jack London turned truth into fiction, and then some.
by Andrew Rihn via The Saturday Evening Post on May 19, 2025
Painting of the archangel Michael, holding shield, defeating Satan and other angels.

Extremist Pop Culture and the American Evangelical Right

Jack Chick and the origins of the 1980s “Satanic Panic."
by Sean Goodman via Journal of the History of Ideas Blog on December 16, 2024
Burglar sneaking into the bedroom of a sleeping woman.

True Crime: Allan Pinkerton’s “Thirty Years a Detective”

Am 1884 guide to vice and crime by the founder of the world’s largest private detective agency.
by Sasha Archibald via The Public Domain Review on December 5, 2024
Donald Trump

Racism Against Haitians Didn’t Begin in Springfield, Ohio

In the early 19th century, US elites demonized the self-liberated slaves of the Haitian Revolution as dangerous practitioners of barbaric rituals.
by Ayendy Bonifacio via Jacobin on September 18, 2024
Rupert Murdoch directing coverage in the New York Post's press room.

The Summer When the New York Post Chased Son of Sam

An oral history of the tabloid race to cover the serial killer.
by Frank DiGiacomo, Susan Mulcahy via Curbed on September 17, 2024
Drag queen reading book to children.

Censorship Through Centuries

A new book examines battles over drag story hours and book bans through the lens of LGBTQ history.
by Rebecca L. Davis via Literary Hub on September 9, 2024
Eyes looking through the stripes on an American flag as if they were window blinds.

How Conspiracy Theory Made America

Americans are seized by conspiracy theories, and as a result, democracy is in peril—so conventional wisdom holds.
by Michael Cuenco via Compact on August 2, 2024
Clara Bow

Taylor Swift’s Homage to Clara Bow

The star of the 1920s silver screen who appears on Taylor Swift’s new album abruptly left Hollywood at the height of her success.
by Deirdre Clemente, Annie Delgado via The Conversation on April 15, 2024
Jewish moneylender choking debtor

"A Fiendish Fascination"

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.
by David S. Reynolds via New York Review of Books on February 1, 2024
Young boy receiving polio vaccine from doctor

Hesitancy Against Hope: Reactions to the First Polio Vaccine

Hesitancy and opposition to vaccines has existed in the past, and such awareness provides needed context to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine within American history.
by Stephen E. Mawdsley via Process: A Blog for American History on January 9, 2024
Planned Parenthood center in Kentucky

The 113-Year-Old Law Behind Anti-Abortion Activists’ Latest Scheme

The Christian right is pushing a slate of laws to stop a new, vague offense they have dubbed “abortion trafficking.”
by Melissa Gira Grant via The New Republic on September 7, 2023
Photos of Harriet Boyd and Cora Stewart.

They Were Fearless 1890s War Correspondents—and They Were Women

Were Harriet Boyd and Cora Stewart rivals in Greece in 1897? The fog of war has obscured a groundbreaking tale.
by Richard Byrne via The New Republic on August 25, 2023
The stairs leading to the segregated section of a cinema in Belzoni, Mississippi, in 1939.

The Writers Who Went Undercover to Show America Its Ugly Side

In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar America.
by Samuel G. Freedman via The Atlantic on July 10, 2023
Photo-Illustraton of Adolph Ochs.

The Invention of Objectivity

The view from nowhere came from somewhere.
by Darrell Hartman via The Atlantic on June 3, 2023
Soldiers, sailors and marines in Los Angeles, June 7, 1943, stopping a street car looking for zoot suits.

Where and How the Zoot Suit Riots Swept Across L.A.

A location-based timeline and interactive map of the L.A. Zoot Suit Riots.
by Christian Orozco via Los Angeles Times on June 2, 2023
A woman poses with a kitten next to a wooden barrel labeled "Queen of the Mist"
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American Daredevils

The nineteenth-century commitment to thrilling an audience embodied an emerging synergy of public performance, collective experience, and individual agency.
by Robert Westbrook, Betsy Golden Kellem, William P. Goldman, Jacob Smith, Aimee Nezhukumatathil via JSTOR Daily on May 24, 2023
Photograph, “The Burning City of San Francisco."

Eyewitness Accounts of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

The heart of this book is the sharp and disjointed accounts of survivors, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise.
by Sasha Archibald via The Public Domain Review on May 23, 2023
Security guards separate guests on an episode of ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ titled ‘I am pregnant by my half-brother.’

Jerry Springer and the History of That [Bleeping] Bleep Sound

As ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ climbed the ratings ladder, the censorship bleep became a star of the show.
by Matthew F. Jordan via The Conversation on May 2, 2023
Painting called "Hudibras’ Discomfiture at the Hands of the Skimmington," by Francis Le Piper, seventeenth century.

American Charivari

The history and context of the made-up aesthetics of the early Ku Klux Klan.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via Lapham’s Quarterly on April 24, 2023
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