Gone with the Wind poster

The Dangers of Gone With The Wind‘s Romantic Vision of the Old South

Writer Margaret Mitchell was born on November 8th, 1900, at the beginning of a new century. Her novel Gone ...
Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison on Race

Ralph Ellison believed fiercely in the American project and in the centrality of black people to it.
Dance hall illustration

Jane Addams’s Crusade Against Victorian “Dancing Girls”

Jane Addams, a leading Victorian-era reformer, believed dance halls were “one of the great pitfalls of the city.”
Choctaw woman

How 19th Century Women Were Taught to Think About Native Americans

In nineteenth-century American women's magazines, Native American women were depicted as attractive, desirable, and pious.
Blue Black gallery view

Glenn Ligon’s “Blue Black” Exhibits the History of Race in America

Artist Glenn Ligon grounds his work in American history, addressing the inextricable link between history of slavery and the black experience in the U.S.
black power salute olympics

The Uneasy History of Integrated Sports in America

The integration of collegiate and professional sports parallels the civil rights movement, but in important ways it was a whole different track.
The Nightmare

The Racialized History of “Hysteria”

Even three decades after “hysteria” was deleted from the DSM-III, some of the word’s diagnostic power obviously still remains.
World War II Veterans

The Inequality Hidden Within the Race-Neutral GI Bill

While the GI Bill itself was progressive, much of the country still functioned under both covert and blatant segregation.
Clarence Darrow

How African Americans Supported Evolution in the 1925 Scopes Trial

Dayton, Tennessee has a new statue of Clarence Darrow, the evolutionist and criminal defense attorney of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial.
Smoke billowing over Tulsa, Oklahoma during 1921 race riots

The Devastation of Black Wall Street

Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1921. A wave of racial violence destroys an affluent African-American community, seen as a threat to white-dominated American capitalism.