A Cold War Baby: Happy Birthday, Alvin!
The submersible Alvin is sixty years old this year. Numerous overhauls and upgrades have kept the craft going down (and coming back up!).
The Annotated Oppenheimer
Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
Using False Claims to Justify War
Hardly the recent innovation it’s frequently mistakened to be, deception as a path to war has been used by American presidents since the 1800s.
A Flood of Tourism in Johnstown
Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.
Two William McKinley Autopsies
The 1901 assassination of US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo revealed the abysmal state of race relations in America.
Chicanx Studies: A Foundational Reading List
The field of Chicanx studies continues to expand, embracing analyses of racialization, gender, sexuality, Indigineity, and trans-ethnic identity.
Suppressing the Black Vote in 1811
As more Black men gained the right to vote in New York, the state began to change its laws to reduce their power or disenfranchise them completely.
“Heed Their Rising Voices”: Annotated
In 1960, an ad placed in the New York Times to defend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists touched off a landmark libel suit.
Black Women Were Also Lynched
A case study of the 1912 lynching of Mary Jackson in Harrison County, Texas, provides insight into the contradictory culture of racial violence.
The Haitian Revolution and American Slavery
For both US politicians and enslaved Black Americans, the Haitian Revolution represented the possibility of a successful violent rebellion by the oppressed.