Tag
American History
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B-Sides: Lydia Millet’s “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart”
What if you wanted something a bit more from the giants of the past: to force them to look at what they’ve done, to hold them accountable for the world we now inhabit, thanks to them?
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The Poverty of Homeownership
On both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom—even as real estate has repeatedly been proven a relentless driver of inequality.
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The Fight for Justice Starts with Blocking Judges Who Are “Tough on Crime”
The story of how Ed Carnes became a judge offers crucial lessons for those who hope to unwind the policies of mass incarceration.
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“I Am the Face of AIDS”: Ryan White and the Politics of Innocence in the History of HIV/AIDS
Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the 1980s–1990s AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced artificial and arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.
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The Porous Prison
“People who may have conceived of a child on a conjugal visit, and changed that child’s diapers and taught them how to fish inside prison, are now forbidden to give them a hug.”
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White Mediocrity Empowers White Villainy: A Conversation with Koritha Mitchell
“Not only does whiteness empower folk to destroy entire communities; it empowers them to say to your face that the destruction doesn’t have reverberating effects in the current moment.”
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“A Theory of America”: Mythmaking with Richard Slotkin
“I was always working on a theory of America.”
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Tenuous Privileges, Tenuous Power
In “The Vice President’s Black Wife,” Amrita Myers paints freedom as a process in which Black women used the tools available to them to secure rights and privileges within a slave society.
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Public Thinker: Gabriel Rosenberg on Industrial Agriculture’s “Brutal, Violent Heteronormativity”
“Much of the anxiety around conversations about meat is a more fundamental horror that we lack a moral language to adequately describe.”
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Subterranean Worlds and Liberatory Futures
The metaphor of the underground as political is rooted in the spatial undergrounds of nineteenth-century America.
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What Makes a Prison?
Recent calls to bring back asylums suggest that confinement can be benevolent, even rehabilitative—but, in reality, “a prison is a prison is a prison.”
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B-Sides: Reading, Race, and “Robert’s Rules of Order”
The famous guidebook of rules, motions, and meetings has a darker history than you might think.
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Milwaukee Socialists’ Triumph & Global Impact
In 1910, the new mayor didn’t promise speed, but pledged “to do all our limited means permit to make Milwaukee a better place for every citizen.”
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The War with Inflation and the Confederacy
During the Civil War, the Lincoln administration demonstrated that a progressive agenda and effective anti-inflationary measures could overlap.
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Rick Perlstein on Garry Wills
“Your first, last, and only obligation is to the reader and to the truth as you see it, without fear or favor.”
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An Uncommon, Unconquerable Mind: Our Friend, Julius S. Scott III (1955–2021)
“Are there ways in which Black North Americans connected to places and things that were outside of the world we thought they were in?”
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Why Renters Fought NYC’s Push for Ownership
“Doesn’t every New Yorker really want to own a co-op?,” a realtor asked a crowd of tenants in 1972. But this provoked only “a chorus of noes.”
