Fifty years ago, an insurance agent named Paul Simpson was convinced of rampant bias on the evening news. So he embarked on a project to record each broadcast and store them at Vanderbilt University.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on US history
Displaying 221 - 240 of 433 articles
An American pilot. A German aide on Capitol Hill. In the first and second world wars, the FBI effectively uprooted foreign influence campaigns. Today, the agency faces an uphill battle.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, ‘The Negro Motorist’s Green Book’ and ‘Travelguide: Vacation and Recreation Without Humiliation’ offered African-American roadtrippers lists of black-friendly businesses.
The Whole Earth Catalog was a blueprint for sustainability that envisioned humans living in balance with nature. Its creative spirit was welcomed in a year riven by war, assassinations and riots.
A historian explains the significance of the Emmett Till murder for the civil rights movement.
In 1987, Anthony Kennedy was nominated to end a titanic Supreme Court fight. Could his putative successor trigger another one?
Big technology firms are becoming known for mistreating workers, customers and society as a whole. Is an economic powerhouse about to collapse like Detroit did years go?
After two years of turmoil at the EPA in the 1980s, President Reagan hit the reset button, choosing a Republican who supported environmental protection to head the agency.
The alignment of Independence Day and a presidential visit to Britain makes more sense than you might think.
When thousands fled violence in Haiti, the US military set up a refugee camp at Guantanamo. Most were sent back to Haiti, while hundreds remained trapped on the base under terrible conditions.
What happens to motivated, determined and egotistical men when they are forced to abandon the White House? As John Quincy Adams once said, ‘There is nothing more pathetic in life than a former president.’
Any movement against sexual assault must take into account historical, state-sanctioned violence against black women in the US that goes back centuries.
Donald Trump was under the mistaken impression that Canadians once burned down the White House. But he’s not the only one who has a fuzzy sense of the history of the War of 1812.
Donald Trump’s recent comments about African-American voters reflect his historical ignorance, but also call attention to an overlooked chapter of US racial history.
The cartoon-turned-Broadway sensation is set in a place named after the Bikini islands, which has a dark history of forced removal and exile of native people from their land.
Memorial Day was born out of generous gestures after the Civil War: Southerners decorated graves of Confederate soldiers as well as those of former Union enemies.
Did Rachel Carson catalyze the organic farming movement, as many advocates claim? Or would she reject their ban on synthetic fertilizer and see organic as an inefficient way to feed the world?
Chemical companies touted synthetic insecticides and herbicides as miracle products in the 1940s and 1950s. But farmers and cropdusting pilots didn’t always buy the sales pitch.
‘I Don’t Want to Get Thin,’ singer Sophie Tucker proclaimed – an attitude that was decades ahead of its time.
Gina Haspel is in hot water over the CIA’s use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. And in decades past, the US imprisoned people for using the same methods.
Top contributors
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Associate Professor of History, Penn State
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Distinguished Professor of History and Environmental Studies, Penn State
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Professor of Journalism, Indiana University
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Professor of Earth Science, University of Connecticut
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Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Utah
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Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, Hunter College
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Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University
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Teaching Fellow, Queen Mary University of London
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Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
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Emeritus Professor of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
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Professor of History, McGill University
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Lecturer, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
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Professor of History, University of the Pacific
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PhD Candidate in History, University of Leeds
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Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University
