Livia Gershon

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.

Activists including W. E .B. Du Bois in the United States and Lajpat Rai in India drew connections between Black American and Indian experiences of white rule.

The peach industry represented a new, scientifically driven economy for Georgia, but it also depended on the rhythms and racial stereotypes of cotton farming.

Concerns about privacy and pressures regarding the physical appearance of women and their homes contributed to the failure of AT&T’s 1960s Picturephone.

The medical profession saw nothing wrong with offering a cocaine-laced cola to white, middle-class consumers. Selling it to Black Americans was another matter.

Advertising went from being an embarrassing activity to a legitimate part of every company’s business plans—despite scant evidence that it worked.

At the height of circus animal acts in the late nineteenth century, animals who killed their captors might be publicly executed for their “crimes.”

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.

In the 1960s and ’70s, guides began wearing period costumes and farming with historical techniques, a change that coincided with the back-to-the-land movement.

As the United States prepared to enter World War I, the government created the first modern state propaganda office, the Committee on Public Information.

The history of garbage dumps is the history of America.

The nineteenth-century establishment of mid-Atlantic coal mines and canals gave America its first taste of abundant fossil fuel energy.

Looking at the development of cotton as a global commodity helps us understand how capitalism emerged.

Critiques of the Thirteenth Amendment have roots in a long history of activists who understood the imprisonment of Black people as a type of slavery.

In the late 1800s, advice writers targeting white, middle-class Americans began encouraging men to become more engaged in the emotional lives of their households.

In the 1960s, the government proposed the construction of two dams in the Grand Canyon, potentially flooding much of Grand Canyon National Park.

Native to Paraguay, Ka’a he’e followed a circuitous path through Indigenous medicine, Japanese food science, and American marketing to reach the US sweeteners market.

Many servicemen became addicted to opioids prescribed during the war. Society viewed their dependency as a lack of manliness.

With the emergence of the US as a global superpower in the twentieth-century, anti-Palestinian stereotypes in the media bled over to stigmatize Arab Americans.

In the eighteenth century, if people in British North America had to travel, they stayed at public houses that were often just repurposed private homes.

Europeans translated the "Chinese Book of Changes" in the nineteenth century, but the philosophy really took off in the West after 1924.

Revelations about secret government programs after Kennedy’s assassination increased the power of conspiracy theories.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, many labor regulations in the US have been crafted with the express purpose of strengthening the male-breadwinner family.

When ranchers began reporting incidents of mutilated cattle, the ensuring panic fed both conspiracy theories and a growing cynicism about the government.