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Pete Rose and Bud Harrelson fighting during a baseball game.

Pete Rose Remembers the Biggest Postseason Brawl in Baseball History

“You know how many second basemen or shortstops I knocked on their ass in my career?”
A woman standing in a field.
partner

Drug Prohibition and the Political Roots of Cartel Violence in Mexico

Until both American and Mexican police forces stop treating it like a war, the violence of drug prohibition won't stop.

American Torture

For 400 years, Americans have argued that their violence is justified while the violence of others constitutes barbarism.

I Am a Big Black Man Who Will Never Own a Gun Because I Know I Would Use It

On history, race, and guns in America.

Laundered Violence

Law and protest in Durham, North Carolina.

Pete Hegseth’s Tattoos and the Crusading Obsession of the Far Right

The symbols sported by Trump’s defense pick show how the medieval past is being reimagined by Christian nationalists, behind a shield of plausible deniability.
Image of the outline of the United States in red fire.

A Dark Reminder of What American Society Has Been and Could Be Again

How an obsessive hatred of immigrants and people of color and deep-seated fears about the empowerment of women led to the Klan’s rule in Indiana.
Magnifying glass on top of the book "The Mask of Sanity" by Hervey Cleckley.

The Man Who Invented the “Psychopath”

Hervey Cleckley wanted to treat the most overlooked psychiatric patients. Instead his work was used to demonize them.
Leatherface swinging a chainsaw branded with the American flag.

It Might Be the Scariest Movie Ever Made. There’s Never Been a Better Time to Watch It.

The vibes right now are very "Texas Chain Saw Massacre."
Citizens march in 1979 with a banner for Greensboro Massacre justice.

How a Group of Revolutionary Anti-Racist Activists Planned to Fight the Klan in North Carolina

Remembering the lead-up to the 1979 Greensboro Massacre.
Ulysses S. Grant finishing his memoir shortly before he died.

Grant vs. the Klan

New books reconsider how Ulysses S. Grant became a forceful defender of the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.
An inaccurate Spanish map from the 1500s of the southeast of the United States.

To Understand Mississippi, I Went to Spain

The forces that would shape my home state’s violent history were set in motion by a 480-year-old map made by a Spanish explorer.
Anti-death penalty protesters standing outside the Supreme Court.

The Hollowing of the Eighth Amendment

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has been quietly rolling back a longstanding consensus over cruel and unusual punishment.
Book cover of "In the Shadow of Liberty," featuring city scenes and barbed wire.

Intended to Be Cruel

On Ana Raquel Minian’s “In the Shadow of Liberty.”
American Indians outside of Fort Laramie.

“Invasion is a Structure Not an Event.” On Settler Colonialism and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

When he reflected on the consequences of empire, Conrad saw no logic or teleology. He saw mayhem. There is no surety in "Heart of Darkness."
Still from Pretty Poison (1968).

The All-American Crack-Up in 1960s Hollywood Cinema

Starting in the 1960s, more and more Hollywood films depicted an increasingly violent and alienated American society quickly losing its mind.
A Black person points to Neshoba county on a map of Mississippi.

The Lynching That Sent My Family North

How we rediscovered the tragedy in Mississippi that ushered us into the Great Migration.
Joe Biden speaking in January.

No, the 2024 Election Won’t Be Anything Like 1968

The election will be a challenge for Joe Biden. But looking to the past won’t help him—or us—understand what lies ahead.
Student protesters at Columbia University in April 1968.

Reviving the Language of Empire

On revisiting the anti-imperialism of the 1960s and ’70s amid the return of left internationalism.
Pro-Israel counterprotesters hold Israeli flags on the edges of a pro-Palestine encampment at Northeastern University in Boston, April 26, 2024.

The New Anti-Antisemitism

The response to college protests against the war on Gaza exemplifies the darkness of the Trumpocene.
The 19-year-old Indian elephant, Fritz-Frederic, favorite of the children of Paris, was put to death after he had gone mad for several days, c. 1910.

Elephant Executions

At the height of circus animal acts in the late nineteenth century, animals who killed their captors might be publicly executed for their “crimes.”
NYPD officers in riot gear march onto Columbia University campus, where pro-Palestinian students were barricaded inside a building and set up an encampment, on April 30, 2024.

Columbia’s Violence Against Protesters Has a Long History

An overlooked history of selective policing at Columbia has undermined the safety of those within as well as beyond campus walls.
Police gather to clear a Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on May 1st.

Anatomy of a Moral Panic

The repressive machine currently arrayed against campus protests follows a familiar pattern.
Mark Rudd speaking to protesters at Columbia University in 1968.

1968 Columbia Protest Leader Mark Rudd: These Kids Are ‘Smarter’

Mark Rudd says a lot has changed in half a century, but not the reason college kids paralyze a campus.
A field of cotton.

What a Series of Killings in Rural Georgia Revealed About Early 20th-Century America

On the continuing regime of racial terror in the post-Civil War American South.
Vice President Joe Biden visits Israel on January 13, 2014.

The Shoah After Gaza

Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built.
A photograph of Anne Morrissy next to the cover of her book, "Street Fight."

The Chicago Taxi Wars of the 1920s

The turbulent history of an often forgotten moment that would leave blood in the streets and shape the modern landscape of Chicago.
A river surrounded by trees and mountains

From the Reservation to the River: On the Complexities of Writing About a Native Childhood

Remembering the river helps me forget, at least for a moment, the challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy I experienced in my childhood.
Joe Biden and George W. Bush.

Biden Is Repeating Bush’s Post-9/11 Playbook. It’s Not Working.

Like his predecessor, the president is decrying anti-Arab and Muslim hatred while helping fuel it. People are refusing to let him get away with this hypocrisy.
A sign left behind by Trump supporters at a rally outside the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, September 27, 2023.

American Fascism

On how Europe’s interwar period informs the present.

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