Battleship NEW YORK at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard dry dock, Bremerton, Washington, ca. 1914

Postcolonial Pacific: The Story of Philippine Seattle

The growth of Seattle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is inseparable from the arrival of laborers from the US-colonized Philippines.
Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson’s Speech on the Indian Removal Act: Annotated

In December 1830, two months after the passage of the Indian Removal Act, President Andrew Jackson used his annual Congressional message to celebrate the policy.
The Suffragette Down with the Tom Cats

A Purrrrfect Political Storm

Crazy cat ladies have come to dominate this election season. It’s hardly the first time.
sunset on a Cancun resort with blue water

Cancún and the Making of Modern “Gringolandia”

Created from almost nothing, Cancún has become a tourist playground that both celebrates and obscures the history of the Yucatán and its peoples.
Brigadier General Smedley Butler, 1927.

Genesis of the Modern American Right

During the Great Depression, financial elites translated European fascism into an American form that joined high capital with lower middle-class populism.
A cover for The Power of Non-violence by Richard Gregg

Richard Gregg: An American Pioneer of Nonviolence Remembered 

Gregg was one of the first translators of Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance for the West.
A high-angle view of a protest march with protesters carrying banners and placards reading 'Lynching is a Social Blot, Wipe it Out!', 'Free the Scottsboro Boys', 'Free Angelo Herndon', and 'Lynching is Un-American, Stop! Lynching' with some of the protestors carrying individual letters that spell out 'Stop! Lynching', United States, circa 1934.

The Long Civil Rights Movement

The “master narrative” of civil rights in the United States obscures the history of a more radical civil rights movement that stretches to the 1930s.
A gay couple and their children attend a rally on the steps of the California Supreme Court March 11, 2004 in San Francisco.

“Protecting Kids” from Gay Marriage

Leading up to a 2004 debate about same-sex marriage, conservatives shifted their focus away from moral issues and toward arguments about children’s welfare.
White Pines in Cathedral Woods, Intervale, White Mountains, N. H

Tree of Peace, Spark of War

The white pines of New England may have done more than any leaf of tea to kick off the American Revolution.
Thurgood Marshall, 1976

Thurgood Marshall

In a speech marking the bicentennial of the US Constitution, Marshall argued that its framers intentionally inscribed slavery into the American economy.