Category: History

An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.

Reniqua Allen — the author of It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America — on Black millennials, millennial burnout, and hope in a time of uncertainty.

By 2030, Chicago’s Black population will have decreased by half a million people in 50 years.

In a new memoir, novelist Bridgett M. Davis reveals that her mother was a Numbers operator in Detroit from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Italy’s “Salvini Decree,” passed last November, has already altered life for many migrants to the country.

With Warren Jeffs in jail, Hildale, Utah has an opportunity to become a real town that serves and protects all its residents, no matter their faiths.

The encyclopedists’ plan to catalog knowledge seemed harmless enough. But what they intended was far more subversive: to restructure knowledge itself.

Thirty years ago, the entire community of Lightning was destroyed to build the Georgia Dome. This oral history, told by displaced residents, compiles memories of a long-gone neighborhood.

Climate change and the border wall are more connected than you might think.

In an excerpt from her debut memoir, Stephanie Land recalls being poor, and moving with her young daughter from a homeless shelter to transitional housing.

“Our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. Our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”

Women who spoke too angrily or too publicly were punished in cruel and unusual ways.

Dorothy Butler Gilliam remembers how exciting it was to integrate The Washington Post, but also how lonely — and often attacked — she felt as the first black woman reporter in the newsroom.

As the Civil War loomed, weapons — like the recently invented bowie knife and rifles that were shipped to Kansas hidden in crates labeled as bibles — became complex political symbols.

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.