Matthew Wills

We can thank the postal service for establishing the foundations of the American tradition of communications confidentiality.

The Postal Savings System offered depositors a US government-backed guarantee of security, but it was undone by for-profit private banks.

Three US presidents from the South’s borders—Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson—worked against Southern politicians to support civil and voting rights.

The defining of corporations as legal “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment rights got a leg up from the fight over a California anti-Chinese immigrant law.

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.

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.

Until the Civil War, regulating immigration to the US was left to individual states. That changed with Emancipation and the legal end of slavery.

The resistance and unionism of enslaved and freed Black women in the midst of the Confederacy is an epic story of sacrifice for nation and citizenship.

To most of the world, “corn” is “maize,” a word that comes from the Taíno mahizwas. Not for British colonists in North America, though.

The Fifth Amendment allows the government to buy private property for the public good. "Public good" being the expansion of white neighborhoods.

In the pages of "Black Mask" magazine, the Continental Op and Race Williams fought the KKK even as they shared its love of vigilante justice.

When it became clear that the United States and its allies couldn’t “liberate” Eastern Europe through psychological war and covert ops, they turned to sports.

It’s difficult to read the gender of children in many old photos. That’s because coding American children via clothing didn’t begin until the 1920s.

During World War II, almost a half million POWs were interned in the United States, where they forged sympathetic relationships with Black American soldiers.

Police K-9 units in the United States emerged during the Civil Rights era. This was not a coincidence.

A form of entertainment and outgrowth of desperation, self-styled rainmakers allowed the powerless people of the Great Plains to seemingly take action.

Thousands of free-born Black people in the North were kidnapped into slavery through networks that operated as a form of “Reverse Underground Railroad.”

Wartime production led to environmental and social injustices, polluting land and bodies in ways that continue to shape public policy and race relations.

Legend says that the campaign to save abused children in New York was driven by the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The truth is more complicated.

J. Edgar Hoover saw the political effectiveness of cracking down on elite brothel madams—but not their clients—in New York City.

“Colorblindness,” an ideology that denies race as an organizing principle of the nation’s structural order, reaches back to the drafting of the US Constitution.

The papers of American labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) offer a snapshot of early twentieth-century politics.

In an era of laissez-faire governance, a growing number of federal and state regulations were justified as necessary to protect public health and morality.