In his 1947 book The World and Africa, W.E.B. Du Bois remarked that a society built on capitalistic exploitation doesn’t see the “blood on the piano keys.” Throughout his lifetime, piano ...

“We need to get the bastards out of here.” It’s a statement that could have been uttered by many American presidents about a wide array of groups through history. John Adams, perhaps, may ...

Rethinking the job of history — and the American Historical Association — after the veto of the Gaza “scholasticide” resolution.

The introduction of the currency in November 1927, replacing the use of the Egyptian Pound, was greeted with jubilation by the Jewish population as a symbolic reaffirming of Jewish rights to the ...

In December 1900, Frank M. Chapman, the first curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History, proposed the idea of the Christmas Bird Count (CBC) in an article in his magazine Bird ...

“There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish … it was so fragile.” So says the dying Emperor Marcus Aurelius at the ...

In 1984, the U.S. rejected the International Court of Justice’s jurisdiction, revealing its tendency to ignore international rules it sees as unfavorable — even when it helped write them.

The U.S. Justice Department recently hauled Google into court for violating an 1890 federal law designed to forestall the unjust consolidation of economic power. Known today as the Sherman Act ...

In December 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, who had a modest sideline in magazine writing, hid a fugitive in her house. A friendly neighbor had sent the man over, and so it was that the ...

Toward the end of the 19th century, as job opportunities expanded for women and people of color, it became harder to find a cook who was willing to work long and hard hours for limited wages ...

Underground communities, in real life, are usually short-term and provisional. For the most part, people live underground much in the same way children can be said to live in treehouses: It can be ...

Lauren Markham is a writer based in California whose work has appeared in outlets such as The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is ...