Person

John F. Kennedy

Related Excerpts

Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson at his desk in November 1957.

When Lyndon B. Johnson Chose the Middle Ground on Civil Rights—and Disappointed Everyone

Always a dealmaker, then-senator LBJ negotiated with segregationists to pass a bill that cautiously advanced racial equality.
Billy Graham leading a prayer at the Republican National Convention, Miami, Florida, August 1968; Richard Nixon is at right.

Victimhood and Vengeance

The contemporary rise of Christian nationalism in the US is a reactionary response to the country’s liberalization over the past half-century.
DDT being sprayed at Jones Beach in New York in 1945.

The Problem With Silent Spring Environmentalism

A new history of the environmental movement places too much emphasis on famous figures like Rachel Carson and shies away from confronting failures.
Demonstrators protest involuntarily institutionalization of mentally ill homeless people.
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Locking Up the Mentally Ill Has a Long History

The prospect of removing people from communities to be put in institutions has been a project of social control.
Map of the western hemisphere, with red rings circling Cuba to show the range of the country's nuclear missiles.

The Cuban Missile Crisis at 60: An Imperfect Memory, but a Useful Warning

Viewed as public memory, the Crisis has an extraordinarily useful function today: a nuclear warning for the future.

A Brief History of One of the Most Powerful Families in New York City: The Morgenthaus

An excerpt from a new book on the so-called "Jewish Kennedys."
Curt Flood of the Saint Louis Cardinals, May 1966. Flood challenged Major League Baseball’s “reserve clause” barring players from changing teams.

A People’s History of Baseball

Communists fighting the color line. Baseball players resisting owners. Baseball's untold history of struggles against racial injustice and labor exploitation.
Richard Nixon, Pat Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Betty Ford walking away from White House

Regime Change, American Style

A new book about Watergate is the first to stress how much we still do not know many of the basic facts about the burglary at its center.
Mushroom cloud of nuclear bomb.

Forgetting the Apocalypse

Why our nuclear fears faded – and why that’s dangerous.
JFK and Jackie Kennedy with wedding party

You’ll Miss Us When We’re Gone

The rise and fall of the WASP.
Cecil B. Moore, president of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, speaks to people gathered at the Reyburn Plaza construction site for the Municipal Services building.
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Northern Civil Rights and Republican Affirmative Action

One focus of the 1960s struggle for civil rights in the North were the construction industries of Philadelphia, New York and Cleveland.
McGeorge Bundy with Lyndon Johnson in 1967

American Mandarins

David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?
Photograph of John Gunther, an American journalist.

The Book That Unleashed American Grief

John Gunther’s “Death Be Not Proud” defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.
American Catholic book cover

Americanism and the ‘Roman’ Catholic

Daniel James Sundahl reviews D. G. Hart’s American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War.
Liquor shop operated by Patrick J. Kennedy, storefront reading "Cotter and Kennedy"
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Bridget the Grocer and the First American Kennedys

History has paid little attention to Bridget Kennedy, JFK’s widowed great-grandmother, who managed both her family and business in Boston's anti-Irish climate.
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.
Fast food with the seal of the president on the containers.

How the State Created Fast Food

Because of consistent government intervention in the industry, we might call fast food the quintessential cuisine of global capitalism.
Illustration of burning cannabis with helicopters overhead

The Cold War Killed Cannabis As We Knew It. Can It Rise Again?

Somewhere in Jamaica survive the original cannabis strains that were not burned by American agents or bred to be more profitable.
Pile of US paper currency.

Austerity Policies In The United States Caused ‘Stagflation’ In The 1970s

U.S. government policies must continue to support physical and social infrastructure spending amid the continuing pandemic to avoid ‘stagflation’.
Magazine advertisement for United States Steel, highlighting a kitchen countertop, lawn furniture and playground equipment, and a suspension bridge.
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Making Steel All Shiny and New

When it seemed that steel had lost its gleam with American consumers, the industry turned to marketing to make it shine again.