Tag: History

The most remarkable thing about Patience Worth wasn’t that she was dead. It was that all she wanted to do was write books.

Distraught over a sick or disabled child, parents would torture — sometimes even kill — what they believed to be a malevolent stand-in for a stolen baby.

An Englishman searches for what’s left of Providence, a failed Puritan colony in the Caribbean.

Or, how we learned to stop worrying and love the gas.

What changes politically if Parliament moves to a modern, inclusive space from one steeped in sexist, classist history?

Ordinary details can furnish a room, they can set a table, they can fill the time between hushed meetings of planned genocide.

On Guthrie, Robeson, Seeger, Lomax, Dylan, the Red Scare, the fall of labor, and what folk music had to do with it.

Civil War monuments in the North erased an emancipated Black population. But the Sphinx looked to a new world: an integrated Africa and America.

The alcohol epidemic devastated Native American communities, leading to crippling poverty, astonishingly high mortality rates — and a successful sobriety movement.

The historians, activists, reporters, and columnists who tell the complicated and ever-changing story of their own community.

The merchants of Haight-Ashbury advertised a summer of free food, free lodging, and free love. What they got instead was a civic nightmare.

For years, historians have blamed King Leopold of Belgium. But did they fall for Allied propaganda?

How does someone get away with helping a foreign adversary? Writer Sarah Laskow digs into the gonzo story of an American acquitted of spying for the Soviets—even after he confessed to it.

In 1970, a homeless woman pregnant with her third child met with two lawyers at a pizzeria in Dallas. Did it matter, in the end, who Jane Roe really was?

Is he confused, insane, or just paranoid? Evan Osnos traces the history of presidential incapacity for the New Yorker

The 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara galvanized environmental activism, and Pacific Standard’s oral history is a great read.

“Mississippi Goddam” was an angry response to tragedy, in show tune form.

How Coretta Scott King’s “grace, diginity, and poise” in the face of horrific tragedy fuelled the Civil Rights Movement.

Kind of takes the thrill out of your Cadbury Creme, your Kinder Surprise.

It has stifled suffrage, blamed immigrants for chaos, and suppressed civil rights. It’s also how Donald Trump views the entire world.

Contemplating history, family, and today’s America, Dane A. Wisher tells the story of spreading his father’s ashes on the battlefield at Gettysburg National Park and coming to terms with his life and death.

Those who would build enormous structures—skyscrapers, bridges, border walls—should do so with an eye toward their eventual ruin.

A madman versus a crook? Unexpected twists? Fake news? Welcome to the election of 1800.

Meet the lifestyle and wellness hawkers of 13th century Italy: the Monks of Santa Maria Novella.

The first report from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966 was a passionate defense of the government’s role in the arts.

“Get Off the Track!” borrowed the melody of a racist hit song and helped give a public voice to the abolitionist movement.

Louisiana Rien Fertel explores the complex history of New Orleans’ flambeaux — the men who carry the torches that light the way for Mardi Gras parades — in Oxford American.

Des Kappel is the toponymist in charge of naming the 90,000 remaining land features and lakes in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Kappel’s work is often an emotional tour through history as he collects letters and photos of war casualties for his database.

Dead bodies, thieves, skulls, and historical bits of ephemera that fly out of pockets on the passage down are just some of the hidden secrets that laundry chutes reveal.

Running a bookstore is hard enough, but the business of feminist bookstores is deeply entwined with both politics and money.