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Nancy Reagan speaking at a podium with a "Just say no" logo.

The Suburban Imperatives of America's War on Drugs

Since the 1950s, disparities along class and racial lines have defined the nation's drug policy.
Southdale mall

How the Cold War Shaped the Design of American Malls

America's first mall was designed as an insular utopia, providing shelter and a controlled environment during uncertain times.

American Green

How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America, and what is the ecological cost?
Opening frame of documentary segment in question.
partner

Confronted: A Black Family Moves In

Northern whites reveal their deep-seated prejudice when a black family moves into their neighborhood.
Home owners Loan Corporation map of Detroit.

Beyond Brown: The Failure of Desegregation in the North and America’s Lingering Racial Fault Lines

On the ongoing legal struggle for educational and racial equality across the United States.
A very large American home with three garages.

The Invention that Accidentally Made McMansions

How gang-nail plates led to bigger homes.
The sold-out crowd at Yankee Stadium’s first opening day.

Major League Baseball’s Historical Quest to Entice Middle- and Upper-Class Fans to the Park

MLB’s focus on wealthier fans stands in stark contrast to rhetoric about the ballpark that had long called it a site of egalitarian intermixing.
Mike Dirnt, Billy Joe Armstrong, and Tré Cool from the band Green Day.

How Green Day’s American Idiot Pitted Punk Against George W Bush

Twenty years ago, a trio of Calfornian stoners released a polemic against Republican America that politicised a generation.
partner

Electing the President, 1840-2020

Most election maps emphasize the candidates and parties who won the Electoral College. This project shifts the focus to voters, revealing a more nuanced story.
Karl I of Austria.

Feeling Blessed

At the Habsburg Convention in Plano.
Painting of a square, white, house surrounded by trees, shrubbery, and a sidewalk.

Chicago Dream Houses

How a mid-century architecture competition reimagined the American home.
Newspaper article titled "Black Men Versus the Drug Problem."

Heroin And Chocolate City: Black Community Responses To Drug Addiction In The Nation’s Capital

As early at 1955, government reports indicated that DC’s emerging drug problem represented “a serious and tragic and expensive and ominous” development.
A nearly gutted department store escalator in Owings Mills Mall in Owings Mills, Maryland.

The Life and Death of the American Mall

The indoor suburban shopping center is a special kind of abandoned place.

Why Did I Hike 50 Miles Through the Jersey Suburbs? Teddy Roosevelt Told Me To

The 26th president once demanded that military personnel be able to walk 50 miles in 20 hours. I set off on an ill-fated mission to see if I could do it myself.
Ronald Reagan signing anti-drug legislation as Nancy Reagan and legislators look on.
partner

America's War on Drugs Was Always Bipartisan—And Unwinnable

There was really only one big difference between liberal drug warriors and conservative ones.
Betty Friedan

The Abandonment of Betty Friedan

What does the academy have against the mother of second-wave feminism?
Man spinning record player with woman in the background

Making Music Male

How did record collecting and stereophile culture come to exclude women as consumers and experts?
The image of the forlorn girl on the outskirts of the Highway to Nowhere was shot by John Van Horn in the fall of 1968

Road to Ruin

In the late 1960s, Baltimore began demolishing Black neighborhoods to make room for an ill-fated expressway. Will the harm from the Highway to Nowhere ever be repaired?
Crowds and escalators in the Mall of America.

The Rise and Fall of the Mall

Alexandra Lange's "Meet Me by the Fountain" recovers the forgotten past and the still hopeful future of the American shopping mall.
Postwar photograph of a white family holding hands, looking at a new suburban house for sale.
partner

Whites-Only Suburbs: How the New Deal Shut Out Black Homebuyers

Race-based federal lending rules from New Deal programs kept Black families out of suburban neighborhoods, a policy that continues to slow economic mobility.
Picture of the apartment buildings within Co-op City sit along the banks of the Hutchinson River in the Bronx.
partner

Could Cooperative Housing Solve Today’s Affordability Crisis?

Housing costs are skyrocketing. History offers a path forward.
Plans for the Baldwin Terrace housing development (Plat Book 22, Page 35, St. Louis County Recorder of Deeds, Clayton, Missouri).

Who Segregated America?

Federal housing policies contributed to the segregation of American cities in the twentieth century. But it was private interests that led the way.
An image of a sardine can with a large group of people shoved inside.

The People Who Hate People

Of all the objections NIMBYs raise to new housing and infrastructure, perhaps the most risible is that their community is already too crowded.
Picture of former President Bill Clinton looking downtrodden.

The Disastrous Legacy of the New Democrats

Clintonites taught their party how to talk about helping people without actually doing it.
People in Ukrainian subway station converted into bomb shelter with makeshift beds and kitchen.

The History of the Family Bomb Shelter

Throughout history, the family bomb shelter has reflected the shifting optimism, anxieties, and cynicism of the nuclear age.
Dancing at the spring festival at St. George in 1984.

'The World Was Ukrainian'

A stubborn and surprising immigrant enclave, hiding in plain sight on the Lower East Side.
A picture of an eerie dark house.

This House Is Still Haunted: An Essay In Seven Gables

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.
Illustration of Frankenstein's monster and a terrified woman

The Horror Century

From the first morbid films a hundred years ago, scary movies always been a dark mirror on Americans’ deepest fears and anxieties.
Aerial photograph of the San Fernando Valley in 1953.

How Los Angeles Pioneered the Residential Segregation That Helped Divide America

After real estate agents invented racial covenants in the early 1900s, L.A. led the nation in using them. Their idea of 'freedom' shapes the U.S. today.
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.

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