J. Edgar Hoover

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the age of surveillance.

During the Depression, more than a million people of Mexican descent were deported. Author Francisco Balderrama says that most were American citizens.

Memos on "aliases," sexuality, and The Blood Counters.

On the Second Red Scare and the lessons that it can provide for us today.

On underground presses and state violence.

The Black Panthers shook America before the party was gutted by the government. Their children paid a steep price, but also emerged with unassailable pride.

In 1931, Herbert O. Yardley published a tell-all book about his experiences leading a covert government agency called the Cipher Bureau.

A newly released classified document shows that the National Security Agency knew Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy—and that the government executed her anyway.

How a local prosecutor protected white supremacists and went on to a career in Washington, DC.

Richardson’s work is as much about the contradictions of our shared past as it is an urgent call to action around the current authoritarian crisis.

Matthew Lassiter’s history plays out in ranch houses, high school parking lots, and courtrooms from Shaker Heights to Westchester to Orange County.

In Chicago, preservationists have launched an unusual effort to explore the radical history of the 1960s civil rights group through the city’s built environment.

The primary sources on Kissinger’s controversial legacy.

Martin Scorsese's new film revisits the murders of wealthy Osages in Oklahoma in the 1920s

It was J. Edgar Hoover who did more than any fire-breathing churchman to turn fearful white suburbanites into the crusaders of a renewed conservative backlash.

The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the U.S. in WWII was matched only by the ambivalence the U.S. showed toward principles on which WWII was fought.

A journalistic view of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, work, and representation in American society.

The 1960 film was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its arrival in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt in Hollywood.

Communists were excluded from an Oklahoma Pride festival recently, a reminder of how easily the Red Scare’s mechanisms for state repression can be revived.

The government responded with ruthless persecution — just one egregious example in the NSA’s long, sordid history of fiercely guarding its secrecy.