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Photograph of Mike Mahoney on the White House grounds.

Blood and Vanishing Topsoil

“We’re the virus.” So read a tweet in March praising reports of less pollution in countries under COVID-19 lockdown. By mid-April, it had nearly 300,000 likes.
Roosevelt statue

Why It's Right That the Theodore Roosevelt Statue Comes Down

Like the museum behind it, the monument was designed in large part to train white people in a fundamentally racist way of seeing.

Eugenics and the White Moderate

Reflections on the COVID crisis from Reconstruction.

Algorithms Associating Appearance and Criminality Have a Dark Past

In discussions about facial-recognition software, phrenology analogies seem like a no-brainer. In fact, they’re a dead-end.

Eugenic Sperm

A "test tube baby" grapples with the dark corners of 20th century reproductive technologies.
Elizabeth Warren at a debate podium.
partner

Why Family Separation Is So Central to Trump’s Immigration Vision

Strengthening family ties has been key to overcoming nativism — and in 2020, it can do so again.
Broadside for debate between W.E.B. DuBois and Lothrop Stoddard.

When W.E.B. Du Bois Made a Laughing Stock of a White Supremacist

Why the Jim Crow-era debate between the African-American leader and a ridiculous, Nazi-loving racist isn’t as famous as Lincoln-Douglas.

This Land Is Whose Land? Indian Country and the Shortcomings of Settler Protest

As a Native person, I believe “This Land Is Your Land” falls flat.
Immigrant women at Ellis Island.

A Journalist on How Anti-Immigrant Fervor Built in the Early Twentieth Century

A century ago, the invocation of science was key to making Americans believe that newcomers were inferior.

When Good Scientists Go Bad

Science doesn’t make you magically objective, and it’s not separate from the rest of human experience.

White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots

A long-overdue excavation of the book that Hitler called his “bible,” and the man who wrote it.

DNA Tests Make Native Americans Strangers in Their Own Land

Reviving race science plays into centuries of oppression.
Illustration of Arthur Estabrook taking a photograph of Carrie and Emma Buck.

Finding Carrie Buck

Doctors who sterilized Carrie Buck said she was a “feeble-minded” woman whose future offspring posed a threat to society. Her life paints a different picture.
A field of gravestones.

Good Bones

What is a small, historically-minded community meant to do with something like Western State Hospital?

The White Man, Unburdened

How Charles Murray stopped worrying and learned to love racism.

How American Racism Influenced Hitler

Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.

The US Medical System is Still Haunted by Slavery

Medicine’s dark history helps explain why black mothers are dying at alarming rates.
Hannah Mayer Stone with Margaret Sanger and other activists.

An Emancipation Proclamation to the Motherhood of America

A profile of Hannah Mayer Stone, one of the key figures in the struggle to make contraception safe, effective, and widely available.

The Mythical Whiteness of Trump Country

"Hillbilly Elegy" has been used to explain the 2016 election, but its logic is rooted in a dangerous myth about race in Appalachia.

Our Long, Troubling History of Sterilizing the Incarcerated

State-sanctioned efforts to keep the incarcerated from reproducing began in the early 20th century and continue today.

What the Nazis Learned from America

Rigid racial codes in the early 20th century gained the admiration not only of many American elites, but also of Nazi Germany.

Literacy Tests and Asian Exclusion Were the Hallmarks of the 1917 Immigration Act

One hundred years ago, the U.S. Congress decided that there needed to be severe limits on who was coming into the country.
Oneida Community members outside their mansion house, ca. 1865-1875.
partner

When We Say “Share Everything,” We Mean Everything

On the Oneida Community, a radical religious organization practicing “Bible communism,” and eventually, manufacturing silverware.

America Has Always Seen Ambitious Women as Unhealthy

The long, sad history of accusing women who seek power and influence of ugliness and ill health.

“The Passing of the Great Race” at 100

In the age of Trump, Madison Grant's influential work of scientific racism takes on a new salience.
Woman who looks unhappy.

Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States

A shameful part of America’s history.

Donald Trump and the Return of the 1920s

We are again caught between nationalists longing for an imagined past, and activists invoking ideals the nation has not attained.
Alice Rhinelander surrounded by well-dressed family members awaiting the jury verdict in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander.

How an Interracial Marriage Sparked One of the Most Scandalous Trials of the Roaring Twenties

Under pressure from his wealthy family, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander claimed that his new wife, Alice Beatrice Jones, had tricked him into believing she was white.
Sketch of Mother and Infant, by J. Alden Weir, 1888.
partner

Keep Her Body from Pain and Her Mind from Worry

A reading list tracing the history of the birth control movement through novels.
Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennet

The Frenemies Who Fought to Bring Birth Control to the U.S.

Though Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett shared a mission, they took very different approaches. Their rivalry was political, sometimes even personal.

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