Elizabeth Hinton

Today, nearly 2.2 million Americans are behind bars. Can contemporary mass incarceration's roots be traced to LBJ's Great Society?

How should historians respond to the urgency of this current political moment?

If fact-checking could fix us, we’d be a utopia by now.

Beginning in 1967, the Army built fake towns to train police and military officers in counterinsurgency.

In 1790, Philadelphia opened the first American penitentiary, with the nation’s first solitary cells. Black people were disproportionately punished from the start.

The public widely opposed wiretapping until the 1970s. What changed?

“What if we identified the politics of municipal debt as circumscribing political horizons and futures?”

Two books trace anti-police uprisings to the urban riots of the Civil Rights era. But as people took to the streets in 2020, why did so few pick up a brick?

What began as a protest, rally, and march ended as something altogether different—a day of anarchy that challenges the terminology of history.

The filmmaker and photographer’s work shows late-sixties Black activism to be a joyful, community-building project.

Cuts to public services that might mitigate poverty and promote social mobility have become a perpetual excuse for more policing.

Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.

The restrictions imposed during recent racial justice protests have their roots in efforts to “contain” Black Americans. 

The US carceral state is a monstrosity with few parallels in history. But most accounts fail to understand how it was created, and how we can dismantle it.

President Trump is building on a tactic pioneered by segregationists.

How a landmark report on the 1960s race riots fell short on police reform.

Two new books, including ‘Locking Up Our Own,’ address major blind spots about the causes of America’s carceral failure.