Antique wood truncheon club from the 1920s

The Rise of Police Torture in New Orleans

Even as crime rates dropped in the 1930s, the police of New Orleans stepped up their use of torture to obtain confessions from Black Americans accused of crimes.
Wilbert Hunt, 97, the oldest member of the Pueblo of Acoma, casts his ballot at the Acoma Tribal Center in Acoma, New Mexico, 2004

The Fight for Native American Voting Rights

Despite the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, Native American activists have had to repeatedly take their fight for voting rights to Congress.
Air Force Chief of Staff General David C. Jones briefs the National Security Council on possible military options during the second meeting on the Mayaguez crisis, 1975

The Mayaguez Incident: The Last Chapter of the Vietnam War

Reeling from defeat in Vietnam, the US invaded a Cambodian island to rescue a US freighter—just before its crew members, who were elsewhere, were released.
Beale Street, Memphis

Memphis: The Roots of Rock in the Land of the Mississippians

Rising on the lands of an ancient agricultural system, Memphis has a long history of negotiating social conflict and change while singing the blues.
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.