History
Bad Information
We should blame conspiracy theories like QAnon on politics, not the faulty reasoning of individuals.
The Specter of Inflation
Democrats don’t lose elections because of rising prices. They lose when they cut spending and raise interest rates, sacrificing other goals at the altar of price stability.
The United States Is Not “a Nation of Immigrants”
Celebrations of multiculturalism obscure the country’s settler colonial history.
How Not to Fix Gentrification
The community development industry has failed in the fight for fair housing. Despite claiming to involve residents, power and self-interest still have the final say.
Lost in Space
Billionaires such as Musk, Bezos, and Branson peddle the idea that space represents a public hope, all the while reaping big private profits.
Looking for Nat Turner
Frightened slaveowners cast the rebel leader as a monster. Scholars have misunderstood his religiosity. A new creative history comes closer than ever to giving us access to Turner’s visionary life.
What Is Infrastructure, Anyway?
The fight over the American Jobs Plan reflects a long history of competing visions of public works—and, most of all, who should benefit from rebuilding.
In the Common Interest
How a grassroots movement of American farmers laid the foundation for state intervention in the economy.
Mike Nichols and the American Century
The director’s life reflected both the feats and the failures of the postwar U.S. experience.
Poland’s Memory Politics Are Rewriting History
The country’s ruling party is suppressing research and cultural work on the role of ethnic Poles in the persecution of Poland’s Jews.
Beyond the Nation-State
Sovereign states have been wrongly mythologized as the natural unit of political order.
The Feminist Past History Can’t Give Us
Recent efforts to commemorate Laura Bassi—a pioneering physicist in eighteenth-century Italy—often say more about us than the world of women in science.
Reclaiming the Power of Rebellion
Derecka Purnell interviews historian Elizabeth Hinton about her new book and how talk of “riots” discredits Black political demands.
How ACT UP Did It
Sarah Schulman’s history shows how AIDS activists forced the government to accept that they mattered.
The Menthol Cigarette Ban Shows There Is No Democracy Without Petitions
The menthol cigarette citizen’s petition recalls the lost political tradition of petition democracy, when not only could the complaints of any citizen get a hearing, but that hearing would occur publicly—in Congress.
How the Modern NRA Was Born at the Border
Watch our release of the documentary short The Rifleman. Then read an interview with the filmmaker.
Portrait of the United States as a Developing Country
Dispelling myths of entrepreneurial exceptionalism, a sweeping new history of U.S. capitalism finds that economic gains have always been driven by the state.
Police and the License to Kill
Detroit police killed hundreds of unarmed Black people in response to the civil rights movement.
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