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Abstract picture of Robert Johnson

The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”
Bubbles with numbers of black Georgia school teachers, centered is 1896 when there were 3316.

American History XYZ

The chaotic quest to mythologize America’s past.
A black and white picture of Clint Eastwood

Cowboy Confederates

The ideals of the Confederate South found new force in the bloody plains of the American West.
A political cartoon featuring Uncle Sam holding a magnet.

America's Unending Struggle Between Oligarchy and Democracy

A new book charts the long contest between elites and the forces of democracy seeking to dismantle their power.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden behind podiums during the first presidential debate of 2020
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President Trump Gets the Suburbs All Wrong

His conception of what appeals to suburban voters is frozen in the past.
Donald Trump giving a speech under a mural of the Founders.

White Evangelicals and the New American Exceptionalism of Donald Trump

The president's "1776 Commission" marks a turning point in his rhetoric.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during a news conference in Austin
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Though Often Mythologized, the Texas Rangers Have an Ugly History of Brutality

Teaching accurate history about white supremacy may be painful, but it's essential.

Hygeia: Women in the Cemetery Landscape

The Mourning Woman emerged during a revival of classical symbolism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gravestone iconography.
Image of street corner in the Bronx, New York

Boroughed Time

Confronting a long tradition of projecting fantasies onto the South Bronx.

The Return of American Fascism

How a legacy of violent nationalism haunts the republic in the age of Trump.
Book cover of "Ride the Devil's Herd," featuring a mustachioed man wearing a hat

Wyatt Earp Does Not Rest in Peace

A pair of new books about US Marshal Wyatt Earp are now out. Only one of them shoots straight.

The Next Lost Cause?

The South’s mythology glamorized a noble defeat. Trump backers may do the same.

UVA and the History of Race: The George Rogers Clark Statue and Native Americans

Unlike the statues of Lee and Jackson, these Charlottesville monuments had less to do with memory than they did with an imagined past.

Americans Are Determined to Believe in Black Progress

Whether it’s happening or not.

The Edge of the Map

Monsters have always patrolled the margins of the map. By their very strangeness, they determined the boundaries of the regular world.
E.J. Banks, a Texas Ranger, in front of a school with an effigy of a Black student hanging over the front door

A Century Ago, One Lawmaker Went After the Most Powerful Cops in Texas. Then They Went After Him

The Texas Rangers were vicious enforcers of white power. J.T. Canales, who once fought against them lost, but the reckoning he sought is finally underway.
Photograph of Sun Ra by Ming Smith

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

Sun Ra, a seminal artist of afrofuturism, embraced a unique vision of blackness.
Protests at the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, with an image of Robert E. Lee edited in the sky behind them.

How Northern Publishers Cashed In on Fundraising for Confederate Monuments

In the years after the Civil War, printmakers in New York and elsewhere abetted the Lost Cause movement by selling images of false idols.

The Empire of All Maladies

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.
Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota.

The Creator of Mount Rushmore’s Forgotten Ties to White Supremacy

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum was deeply involved with the Ku Klux Klan while designing the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Ga.
People raising their fists and gathered around the Robert E. Lee Memorial in Richmond, Virginia

Europe in 1989, America in 2020, and the Death of the Lost Cause

A whole vision of history seems to be leaving the stage.
Boston's Emancipation Memorial depicting a black man kneeling in front of Abraham Lincoln.

Black Bostonians Fought For Freedom From Slavery. Where Are The Statues That Tell Their Stories?

Contrary to the image of the kneeling slave, Black abolitionists did not wait passively for the "Day of Jubilee." They led the charge.

George Washington Would Have So Worn a Mask

The father of the country was a team player who had no interest in displays of hyper-masculinity.
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Baseball History and Rural America

Baseball's creation myth is bunk, and historians have shown how important cities were to the game's development. But it was still a rural passion.

The Largest Human Zoo in World History

Visiting the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Don’t Look For Patient Zeros

Naming the first people to fall sick often leads to abuse.

The Myth of the “Sixties”

When we mythologize the ’60s, we lose sight of what’s truly ahead of us.
Superman comic illustration

Why Superheroes Are the Shape of Tech Things to Come

Superman et al were invented amid feverish eugenic speculation: what does the superhero craze say about our own times?

6 Myths About the History of Black People in America

Six historians weigh in on the biggest misconceptions about black history, including the Tuskegee experiment and enslaved people’s finances.
Public art featuring silhouettes of enslaved people.

What Do We Want History to Do to Us?

Zadie Smith on Kara Walker, blackness and public art.

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