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History

Philosophy & Religion

The Gospel of Oil

Oil’s grip on U.S. society is as much religious as economic, a new history shows.

Kim Phillips-Fein

Race, Reading Lists

1619 Syllabus

Because when we remember better, we do better. 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Science & Nature

Is Science Political?

Many take the separation between science and politics for granted, but this view of science has its own political history: it was developed, in part, as an anti-communist tool of the Cold War.

Michael D. Gordin

Science & Nature

It Was Not Supposed to End This Way

The Anthropocene challenges liberalism’s vision of permanent progress. So why has it become another technocratic tool of liberal bureaucracy?

Geoff Mann

Politics

The Liberal Who Told Reagan’s Favorite Joke

When Democratic senator Edmund Muskie made a quip about the government being “here to help you,” he surely didn’t know it marked the death of the New Deal.

Lawrence B. Glickman

Race

Black Masculinity Under Racial Capitalism

A truly radical counterhegemony can only be realized by disassociating both blackness and manhood from capitalist registers of worth. 

Jordanna Matlon

Gender & Sexuality

What’s Wrong with Queer History?

In our search for a useful past, we need to be careful whom we name as the heroes of queer history.

Samuel Clowes Huneke

Gender & Sexuality

Is Pete Buttigieg the Face of Stonewall?

The press has crowned Buttigieg the inheritor of Stonewall’s legacy, but this doesn’t square with what we know of Stonewall activists and the world they hoped to create.

Micki McElya

Race

How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean

The expansion of banks such as Citigroup into Cuba, Haiti, and beyond reveal a story of capitalism built on blood, labor, and racial lines.

Peter James Hudson

War & Security

Watching the End of the World

The Doomsday Clock is set to two minutes to midnight—the same position it held in 1953, when the United States and USSR detonated their first hydrogen bombs. So why don't we make movies about nuclear war anymore? 

Stephen Phelan

Arts in Society

Race in Black and White

Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.

Alexis L. Boylan

Law & Justice

How Cars Transformed Policing

Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

Sarah A. Seo

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