Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here reminds us that the U.S. can never be insulated from politicians who thrive on populist rage in pursuit of power.
Joshua D. Rothman
Who Is To Blame? A Violent Act Becomes Political Narrative
Some praised John Brown as a martyr. But most Democrats and Republicans blamed the other party, seeking political advantage.
Ten Significant American Fires
Fire can be a terrifying and ruthless force for historical change.
The Peculiar Institution Expands: Slavery and the Constitution
The landscape of slavery and the number of people imprisoned expanded because structurally and politically the Constitution encouraged it.
The Security State, COINTELPRO, and Black Lives Matter
A long history of government officials equating civil rights activism with subversion.
The Strange Career of the Smithsonian Institution
An unprecedented bequest, lengthy public debate, ten years of Congressional bungling and infighting – the origin story of the Smithsonian is a weird and wild one.
The Charleston Massacre and the Rape Myth of Reconstruction
If Dylann Roof is deranged, his derangement is deeply steeped in a history of white supremacy that has long expressed the threat of black economic and political power in sexual terms.
Harriet Tubman on the Twenty: Changing America’s Story
Last month, voters in an online poll conducted by the organization Women On 20s selected Harriet Tubman as their choice to be the first woman represented on the paper currency of the United States.
The Impossible Moral Dilemmas of Slavery: William Wells Brown and the Slave Trade
William Wells Brown possessed immense and various talents. Born into slavery in Kentucky around 1814, Brown grew up in Missouri, fled enslavement in the early 1830s, and by the early 1840s had become a rising star of the antislavery movement.
President Obama, the National Prayer Breakfast, and Slavery
The controversy over President Obama’s remarks at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast is a strange one.