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Cartoon illustration featuring Pauline Hopkins (center), Booker T. Washington (left), and John C. Freund (right)

Contending Forces

Pauline Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Fight for The Colored American Magazine.
Book cover of Whole Earth, featuring an image of Stewart Brand backlit and walking through a door, encircled by the earth.

On Floating Upstream

Markoff’s biography of Stewart Brand notes that Brand’s ability to recognize and cleave to power explains a great deal of his career.
Illustration of Elizabeth Keckley
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Elizabeth Keckley's Memoir "Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four in the White House"

Keckley’s decision to write about her employers from the viewpoint of a household laborer—she was seamstress to Mary Todd Lincoln—enraged audiences.
Combahee River Collective. Second, from the left, is Barbara Smith.

Eleven Black Women: Why Did They Die?

Barbara Smith, a key contributor to contemporary Black feminist thought, formed the Combahee River Collective to address Black women's interlocking oppressions.
Illustration of a mid-life crisis by Ruth Basagoitia. A man looking into the mirror imagining a cooler version of himself.

Climacteric!

Taking seriously the midlife crisis.
Franz Boas adopts the pose of a wild Hamat̓sa, crouching with outstretched arms and mouth open.

On the Influence of Indigenous Knowledge on Modern Thought

We often associate dance with art and performance, but it is also a way that humans document, interpret, and create history.
Nixon in front of presidential photographs.

Daniel Schorr and Nixon’s Tricky Road to Redemption

Nixon portrayed himself as a victim of the press. But from the 1952 Checkers speech through his post-presidency, he proved to be an able manipulator of the media.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.

How Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Helped Remake the Literary Canon

The scholar has changed the way Black authors get read and the way Black history gets told.
Watercolor portrait of Bronson Alcott, a 19th century American philosopher and educator.

New England Ecstasies

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.
Edit of Grammarly language change suggestions

Why Grammarly’s New Language Suggestions Miss the Mark

Slavery’s a sensitive subject, but so is the question of who gets to be an authority about language.
African American students and teacher in a classroom, Henderson, KY, 1916.

The Origin Story of Black Education

As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.”
The Fisk University Jubilee Singers on tour at the court of Queen Victoria in 1873, painted by Edmund Havel.

‘Dvorák’s Prophecy’ Review: America’s Silent Tradition

The Czech composer came to New York with the conviction that African-American melodies would be the ‘seedbed’ for their nation’s 20th-century music.
Black and white photograph of Lorraine Hansberry smoking a cigarette.

The Many Visions of Lorraine Hansberry

She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?
Black and white photograph of Lucille Clifton.

Lucille Clifton and the Task of Remembering

The poet’s memoir Generations is both a chronicle of her ancestral lineage and lesson in the centrality of Black women to the story of American history.
Harold Washington on a button

Primary Sources are a Vibe

Historian Melanie Newport turns to eBay.
Front page of the Saturday Evening Post

The Persistence of the Saturday Evening Post

When George Horace Lorimer took over as editor of the Saturday Evening Post, America was a patchwork of communities. There was no sense of nation or unity.
The cover of the book Her Stories by Elana Levine

Guiding Lights: On “Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History”

Annie Berke reviews Elana Levine's book on a pivotal genre and its diverse fandom.
Frank Lloyd Wright, a letter, and Edith Carlson

How to Fire Frank Lloyd Wright

The untold story of a world-renowned architect, an obsessive librarian, and a $5,500 house that never was.
Illustration of Henry David Thoreau and Lidian Emerson looking into each other's eyes

Thoreau in Love

The writer had a deep bond with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he also had a profound connection with Emerson’s wife.
Red, white, and blue

‘The Cause’ Review: Revolutionary Answers

The author of ‘Founding Brothers’ tries to capture the breadth of the War for Independence in a single narrative.
A group of people wading in the ocean.

The Swelter of Summer: Heat Waves and the Urban Heat Island in New York City History

A history of record-breaking highs but also of sweaty, sticky, corporeal experiences.
Rembrandt van Rijn self-portrait

Autobiography with Scholarly Trimmings

Even as they tell others’ stories, historians often write about their own lives.
James Baldwin, sitting.
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James Baldwin and the FBI

The author was monitored for his political activities, but also for being gay. The surveillance took a toll on him.
Toussaint Louverture proclaiming the Constitution of the Republic of Haiti

Contagious Constitutions

In her new book, Colley shows how written constitutions developed both as a way to further justify rulers and to turn rebellions into legitimate governments.
Artist's rendition of Omar ibn Said

A Quest for the True Identity of Omar ibn Said, a Muslim Man Enslaved in the Carolinas

Omar ibn Said was captured in Senegal at 37 and enslaved in Charleston. A devout Muslim, he later converted to the Christian faith of his enslavers. Or did he?
John F. Kennedy at his graduation from Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1940

Ending the Kennedy Romance

The first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK reveals the scope of his ambition and the weakness of his political commitments.
A collage of significant people from the time like the Beatles and Elvis.

How Americans Re-Learned to Think After World War II

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.
Photographs and a cover of Spectra, a literary magazine.
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Spectra: The Poetry Movement That Was All a Hoax

In the experimental world of modernist poetry, literary journals were vulnerable to fake submissions.
An illustration of two men in 1770s clothing fighting in a river.

Has the World Gone Mad? An Interview with Sarah Swedberg

Swedberg's new book shows how prevalent concerns about mental illness were to the people of the early American republic.
Mountains in California.

The Lost Rivers of Owens Valley

Water—who owns it, who uses it—has shaped this landscape from the Paiutes’ irrigation canals to the Los Angeles aqueduct.

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