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 ...

Joshua D. Farrington is Assistant Professor of History at Bluegrass Community and Technical College. Civil rights parade at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco. Photograph by ...

Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln might well have been called Stevens, after its alternate protagonist: the irascible chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Thaddeus Stevens. As ...

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 ...

The Northeast caught fire this fall, in a way that recalls its past. History has some lessons about how to manage the region’s fire seasons to come.

“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 ...