Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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The Rage and Rebellion of the Detroit Riots, Captured in One Poem

50 years later, Philip Levine's poem, "They Feed They Lion," helps us remember and understand that time.

The Price of Plenty: How Beef Changed America

Exploitation and predatory pricing drove the transformation of the beef industry – and created the model for modern agribusiness.

What Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” Can Teach the Modern Worker

Dale Carnegie treated the employee-employer relationship as a sacred, symbiotic bond.
Street sign for Flatville, surrounded by flat agricultural fields.

The View from the Middle of Everything

Dispatches From Flatville, Illinois.

On Early 20th-Century America’s Unhealthy Fixation with ‘Hygiene’

Junk Science, paternalism, and a misplaced faith in 'expertise.'

The History Behind Baseball’s Weirdest Pitch

The improbable success of the curveball.
Ad for children's aspirin.

‘Candy Aspirin,’ Safety Caps, and the History of Children’s Drugs

The development, use, and marketing of medications for children in the 20th century.

The Innovation Cult

The function of the "innovation" buzzword is to sustain the myth that business genius creates society’s wealth.

A Very Great Change

The 1868 presidential election through the eyes of a Southern white woman.

The Cautionary Patriotism of the Presidents Adams

Father and son alike, suspicious of too much charisma.
Row of suburban houses.

Welcome to the Radical Suburbs

We all know the stereotypes. But what about the suburbs of utopians and renegades?

We Built a Broken Internet. Now We Need to Burn It to the Ground.

Silicon Valley veteran Mike Monteiro explains how designers destroyed the world.
James Baldwin.

The Forgotten Baldwin

Baldwin demands that the Atlanta child murders be more than a mere media spectacle or crime story, and that black lives matter.

A Brief History of Porn on the Internet

Pornographers were in many ways the innovators who fueled the rise of the internet as we know it.
Garry Winogrand book on a shelf.

Garry Winogrand’s Photographs Contain Entire Novels

A photographer whose work resembles that of a realist novelist, we observe a cast of characters as they change over time.
Jemima Wilkison.

The Person Formerly Known as Jemima Wilkinson

Awakening from illness, the newly risen patient announced that Jemima had died and that her body had been requisitioned by God for the salvation of humankind.

Voices in Time: Horror Movie Scene-Setting

The author of 'High-Risers' revisits 'Candyman,' in which public housing is the greatest horror of all.

Just Like Us

Boston and Providence meet the famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker.

Voices in Time: Epistolary Activism

An early nineteenth-century feminist fights back against a narrow view of woman’s place in society.

Mementos of a Forgotten Frontier

The black pioneers who tried to start over out west.

How Violent American Vigilantes at the Border Led to Trump’s Wall

From the 80s onwards, the borderlands were rife with paramilitary cruelty and racism. But the president’s rhetoric has thrown fuel on the fire.

Encyclopedia Hounds

A few of Encyclopædia Britannica’s famous readers, on the occasion of its 250th anniversary.

The Forgotten Internment of Japanese Americans in Hawaii

A dark chapter in the history of religious persecution.

Uncovering the Truth About a Raid on the Black Panthers

How a team of lawyers exposed lies about police violence.
1890 painting of Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor Was Not the Worst Thing to Happen to the U.S. on December 7, 1941

On the erasure of American "territories" from US history.

New York City, the Perfect Setting for a Fictional Cold War Strike

On Collier’s 1950 cover story, “Hiroshima, USA: Can Anything Be Done About It?”

One Family’s Story of the Great Migration North

Bridgett M. Davis tracks her mother's journey from Nashville to Detroit.
American Indian woman and children.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

“Our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. Our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”

The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten By the Public

That's when the public learned that American multinationals were making enormous bribes to politicians in foreign countries.
Firefighters cutting a trench as a blaze approaches.

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. But modern fire suppression creates fuel for catastrophic fires. Is it time for a change?

1914: Into the Fire

An excerpt from a recently discovered memoir of World War I, "The Burning of the World."

How Horror Changed After WWI

The war created a new world, an alternate reality distinct from what most people before 1914 expected their lives to be.

Prophets of War

Telegraph operators were the first to know news of the Civil War.

Frank Rizzo and the Making of Modern American Politics

An excerpt from Timothy Lombardo's "Blue Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics."

The Origins of Prison Slavery

How Southern whites found replacements for their emancipated slaves in the prison system.

How Small-Town Newspapers Ignored Local Lynchings

Sherilynn A. Ifill on justice (and its absence) in the 1930s.
Students from Ramstein Middle School recite Pledge of Allegiance during a Sep. 11 commemoration ceremony

Why Do We Pledge Allegiance?

Few democracies require children to make a daily declaration of fealty to country.

Rage Against the Machine

An excerpt from a novel by Todd Gitlin that reimagines the violence outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The City Born in a Day

The bizarre origin story of the surprisingly exceptional Oklahoma City, in a government-sanctioned raid called the Land Run.

How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management

The connections between the two systems of labor have been persistently neglected in mainstream business history.

A Wretched Situation Made Plain on Paper

How an engraving of a slave ship helped the abolition movement.

The Visionary John Wesley Powell Had a Plan for Developing the West, But Nobody Listened

Powell’s foresight might have prevented the 1930s dust bowl and perhaps, today’s water scarcities.

What Can We Learn from the Radical Campuses of 1968?

The struggle at universities was never a simple conflict of generations.

Defining Privacy—and Then Getting Rid of It

The beginnings of the end of private life in the late nineteenth century.
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.

Hamilton, Madison, and the Paradox at America’s Heart

The tension between nationalist ambitions and republican principles goes all the way back to our nation’s founding.

How the US Military Helped Invent Cheetos

How the US military figured out how to make self-stable cheese ... and helped invent Cheetos to boot.

1491

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe.
Howard Coffin hosts President Calvin Coolidge on Sapelo Island, Georgia.

Black Gullah Culture Fascinated Americans Just As President Coolidge Visited

The culture on Sapelo Island, Georgia was unique.
Beachgoers speaking to a police officer.

Free the Beach

How seaside towns throughout the northeast limited the ability of ‘undesirables’ to access public beaches.

How Baby Boomers Broke America

Is the Baby Boomer generation to blame for America's crumbling roads, galloping income inequality, bitter polarization and dysfunctional government?
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