Category: History

Compromise and political reform only take you so far; sometimes you need to shake the whole system.

In third-century Syria, a widowed monarch dared to be wildly ambitious — and almost brought the Roman Empire to its knees.

Here’s what voter suppression looked like in Alabama in the middle of the 20th century.

Trust busting is a great idea. But would it be enough?

Angora rabbit fur is fluffy, and silky, and was especially popular with two influential 20th-century groups: Hollywood starlets and Nazi officers.  

Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?

I can’t help but wonder when the decade really ended.

How the Arizona State Parks and Trails Director got fired for violating the Arizona Antiquities Act.

In the 1960s, black students at the Ivies organized and protested for fair treatment, their personal safety, to create black studies programs, and to stop their universities from harming local black communities through expansion and urban renewal.

Watergate revealed that multinational corporations, including some of the most prestigious American brands, had been making bribes to politicians not only at home but in foreign countries.

Nicole Antebi interviews historian David Dorado Romo about the fight to preserve the oldest barrio in El Paso from the City itself.

Howard Hughes used gossip, spies and money to control Hollywood’s women for nearly 60 years. Karina Longworth critically examines the Golden Age’s gossip to stop his false narratives from becoming our history.

Like many non-religious Jews of my generation, I naively assumed Nazism could never rise — and hurt us — again.

Telling Washington’s story without erasing the people and lands that preoccupied him leads to important new questions; like, just how consequential for American history was the first president’s addiction to land speculation?

Were early horror films, with their long, angry processions of the undead, repeating the mass trauma of the First World War, or foreshadowing the coming of the Second?

In the “bizarre and horrifying world” of the early modern Caribbean, maroons and pirates both prized their freedom above all else. And sometimes they worked together to safeguard it.

On pregnancy, demons, and Stranger Things.

When your husband and male heirs are too useless or too dead to rule, you have to take matters into your own poison-gloved hands.

One of the first decisions any tourist had to make when crossing the German border in the mid-1930s was whether or not to “Heil Hitler.”

Physiognomy is a discarded 19th-century pseudoscience. Why can’t we stop practicing it?

How ’90s webzines heralded the best — and worst — of today’s online media landscape.

Kings and popes thought she was their pawn. The Merchant’s Daughter begged to differ.

Author Tim Mohr talks about East Germany’s dissident punk rock scene, and its role in bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989 — the story behind his remarkable new book, ‘Burning Down The Haus.’

One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was the willful misleading of children. Superheroes, he thought, were the worst culprits.

This is the story of how a handfull of mega-rich ended up hoarding most of the world’s wealth.

Even if one of the last surviving Tolstoyan communes has fallen short of Leo Tolstoy’s ideals, it’s still turned into something meaningful. It’s a place for people who don’t want to be found.

Sometimes it takes a touch of darkness to create something alluring.

Secrecy and speechifying, collegiality and hierarchy, exceptionalism and opulence on the Supreme Court.

Just as we were in the 1930s and ’60s, America is suffering a moral crisis. We have to decide which side we are on: hate and exclusion, or justice, inclusion, and democracy?

Allegations that Richard Nixon beat his wife, Pat Nixon, have circulated for decades without serious examination by the journalists who covered his presidency. It’s time to look more closely at what’s been hiding in plain view.