personal history — Bunk History

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A drawing of a microscopic slide of Bacterium lactis.

Dying Before Germ Theory

The harrowing experience of being powerless against illness and death.

by Melanie A. Kiechle via Nursing Clio on July 21, 2025

Mugshot of a man staring blandly into the camera.

What I Inherited from My Criminal Great-Grandparents

In working through the Winter case files, I often felt pinpricks of déjà vu: an exact turn of phrase, an absurdly specific expenditure.

by Jessica Winter via The New Yorker on July 14, 2025

Japanese-American man in a military uniform.

He Spent His Life Trying to Prove That He Was a Loyal U.S. Citizen. It Wasn’t Enough.

How Joseph Kurihara lost his faith in America.

by Andrew Aoyama via The Atlantic on July 9, 2025

Leonard Peltier adjusts the black bandana around his head.

Leonard Peltier’s Story Isn’t Over Yet

The Native activist spent nearly fifty years in prison for the killing of two F.B.I. agents. In January, Joe Biden commuted his sentence, and he went home.

by Nick Estes, Leonard Peltier via The New Yorker on June 26, 2025

Lee Pattie Registrar's Report

Trouble with the Brothers: Booze, Divorce, and Madness in the American West

The past really is a foreign country, as historian Jonathan Ablard finds when piecing together the turbulent history of his ancestors in the West and Midwest.

by Jonathan Ablard via Tropics of Meta on June 23, 2025

Remembering One of America’s First Modern School Shootings, 50 Years Later

A teacher tells the story of 1974’s Olean, New York High School murders.

by Sally Ventura via Literary Hub on June 23, 2025

The Heritage of Dylann Roof

Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.

by Elizabeth Robeson via The Nation on June 17, 2025

Advertisement highlighting recipes to make with Seabrook frozen vegetables.

Decline and Fall of the Spinach Kings: On the Wilting of a Family Dynasty

A history of wealth, enterprise, and family dysfunction.

by John Seabrook via Literary Hub on June 11, 2025

Digital rendering of a woman looking out over rows of blue digital file folders.

Archivists Aren’t Ready for the ‘Very Online’ Era

The challenge: how to catalog and derive meaning from so much digital clutter.

by Michael Waters via The Atlantic on June 4, 2025

Mother's hand holding baby's hand on the cover of "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America".

On Rachel Louise Moran’s "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America"

A new book challenges the discursive ignorance about the condition.

by Audrey Wu Clark via Society for U.S. Intellectual History on May 25, 2025

Cartoon drawing with Red Scare history written on New York City buildings.

When the Red Scare Came for Jessica Mitford

A graphic episode from "Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me."

by Mimi Pond via The Nation on May 13, 2025

V. Ramirez's Army Corps badge.

How Real ID Excludes Real Americans

My dad’s birth certificate said Vicente. His passport said Vince. New legislation would have disenfranchised him.

by Catherine S. Ramírez via Zócalo Public Square on May 12, 2025

Mexican men in line for work in the Bracero program.

What the World War II-Era Bracero Program Reveals About U.S. Immigration Debates

Efforts to restrict immigration have long coexisted with — and even reinforced — the nation's economic reliance on Mexican laborers.

via Retro Report on May 9, 2025

Brown University women's glee club, including Clara Gomberg, the first Jewish woman to graduate Brown.

“A Jewess Would Not Be Acceptable”

When it came to antisemitism, women’s colleges were no better than the Ivy League.

by Amy Sohn via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on May 8, 2025

Indigenous girl among a line of U.S. peace commissioners.

American History Needs More Names

Identifying Sophie Mousseau from a Civil War-Era photo helps us understand our complex past.

by Martha A. Sandweiss via Zócalo Public Square on April 21, 2025

Painting by Hiroki Kawanabe titled Wide Street.

Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration

Brandon Shimoda’s book about the memorialization of Japanese internment camps also speaks to the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

by Francisco Cantú via New York Review of Books on April 3, 2025

Children at the Oakland Community School, 1973.

What Happens When the U.S. Declares War on Your Parents?

The Black Panthers shook America before the party was gutted by the government. Their children paid a steep price, but also emerged with unassailable pride.

by Ed Pilkington via The Guardian on March 25, 2025

Graydon Carter sitting next to stacks of ornate, empty chairs.

Vanity Fair’s Heyday

I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what?

by Bryan Burrough via The Yale Review on March 14, 2025

David Levering Lewis and his book overlaid on a stained glass window.

No Nation Under Their Feet

A historian explores his own family's history to understand the African-American community’s internal pigmentocracy and the absurdity of racial binaries.

by David Levering Lewis, Steve Nathans-Kelly via Chicago Review of Books on February 14, 2025

Chinese workers standing in the streets.

The Long Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act

The true cost of the immigration policy can be measured in the generations of Chinese Americans who were never born.

by Jane C. Hu via The New Yorker on January 23, 2025

Home owners Loan Corporation map of Detroit.

Beyond Brown: The Failure of Desegregation in the North and America’s Lingering Racial Fault Lines

On the ongoing legal struggle for educational and racial equality across the United States.

by Michelle Adams via Literary Hub on January 15, 2025

Sound waves.

Listening Devices

The veterans of Kagnew Station saw the early growth of the surveillance state. Has the passage of time given them a new understanding of their work?

by Ann Neumann via The Baffler on January 6, 2025

Harry Truman holding a register to vote sign with three other men.

Politics Is Personal

The 1946 elections were a disaster for Democrats—and the reason I was born.

by Peter Quinn via Commonweal on December 24, 2024

Kimonos hanging on a clothes line at an internment camp.

The Secret History

An investigation of the US’s mass internment of Japanese Americans.

by Harmony Holiday via Bookforum on December 10, 2024

Jade Stevens rests near Lake Putt on land in California’s Tahoe National Forest.

Can Land Repair the Nation’s Racist Past?

California’s approach to Black reparations shifts toward land access, ownership and stewardship.

by Alexis Hunley via High Country News on December 1, 2024

A drawing of the inside of a printing mill, depicting workers printing art.

The Midnight World

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.

by Michael Chabon via New York Review of Books on November 28, 2024

Young people running through the streets of Taipei; a middle aged businessman in Houston.

Texas’ Hotbed of Taiwanese Nationalism

For decades, Houston families like mine have helped keep the flame of independence burning.

by Josephine Lee via Texas Observer on November 25, 2024

A girl in Native American tribal regalia being crowned as homecoming queen.

The Complex Politics of Tribal Enrollment

How did the U.S. government become involved in “adjudicating Indianness”?

by Rachel Monroe via The New Yorker on November 20, 2024

Men sitting in a bar, drinking and smoking in suits, implied to be members of the Mafia.

How Black Workers Challenged the Mafia

A story of intrigue and power involving union organizers, Black laundry workers, the Mafia, and the FBI in 1980s Detroit.

by Keith Kelleher via The Forge on November 19, 2024

4 photographs of Josie Rudolph Thurnauer through the years 1874-1938.

Josie’s Story: From 19th-Century Sitka To Her Escape From The Holocaust

Josie Rudolph’s life, in an era of worldwide migration and colonial ambition, offers a new perspective on the familiar tale of modern Alaska’s birth.

by Tom Kizzia via Anchorage Daily News on October 28, 2024

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