Illustration of Socrates, in a basket, based on Aristophanes’s The Clouds. Was Socrates a real person? is one of the most googled questions about perhaps the most important philosopher in history. Socrates’s existence as a historical figure is, however, universally...
Process invites proposals and submissions for an upcoming series on the elderly in U.S. history. While there is a vast array of histories relating to youth culture, children, and young adults in the United States, there are fewer comparable studies on the history of...
Boundaries of the lost state of Franklin. Wikimedia Public Domain. It’s one of many tales of the founding of America. Settlers from England were exploring more and more of the New World, and as they did, they set up new communities far from the comfort of home. We...
by Adriana Allegri The Lebensborn Naming Ceremony from Master Race by Catrine Clay and Michael Leapman (1995). When I first learned about Hochland Home, the setting for The Sunflower House, it seemed like the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Few people knew about...
This week sees the publication of my new book, Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West. The main characters are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but unlike the classic movie, there is also emphasis on a wide range of...
The emergence of student loan debt in the late 1960s can be situated within a broader shift towards neoliberal governance, which relies on market incorporation as a means of providing access to basic social provisions, like housing, health care, and education. One way...
Commander Winfield Scott Schley (4th from left) and men who rescued Greely Expedition survivors (Public domain, Wikimedia Images) In 1881, Cdr. Winfield Scott Schley was at the Charlestown Navy Yard reading a newspaper article about the US Army Signal Corps’ ambitious...
William A. Pinkerton with railroad special agents Pat Connell (left) and Sam Finley (right) from the Library of Congress. Even if you’ve only watched a handful of “Wild West” films or TV shows, you’ve probably encountered the Pinkertons. These hired guns are often...
by Jack Kelly Elizabeth Jennings Graham. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. “We are not going back,” is a refrain heard in this year’s election campaign. We like to think of history as steady progress forward. But during the struggle toward human rights and racial...
Baseball has never been particularly popular in the United Kingdom, despite numerous efforts by American businesspeople over the last nearly 150 years to make it so.
To this day, many in the United States recall the 1950s as the height of the era of âbetter living through chemistry.â[1] But it was also the moment when much of the public started to worry, in earnest, about whether the growing number of synthetic chemicals in...
by Stuart E. Eizenstat Grounding the B-1 Bomber Exclusive picture of President Jimmy Carter in Stuart E. Eizenstat’s biography, President Carter. Far more complex, both politically and technically, was a divisive debate over whether to build the B-1 bomber, which...
by Tom Clavin Depiction of the fighting near Dunker Church by Thure de Thulstrup. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Should anyone consider “civil war” over the outcome, one way or the other, of the presidential election that is six weeks from now, let’s look at the...
In the last couple of years, Americans have rediscovered child labor. The Nation reported that âChild Labor is BackâAnd Itâs as Chilling as Everâ and the New York Times declared a âNew Child Labor Crisis in America.â[1] But, as I argue in my recent JAH...
by Jack Kelly Florence Kelley’s father, William, taught his daughter to read in 1866 using books that chronicled child labor. When she was seven, he had her studying “a terrible little book with woodcuts of children no older than myself, balancing with their arms...
By Ronald H. Balson The centre of Rotterdam destroyed after being bombed by the Luftwaffe A Place to Hide is my ninth novel and the seventh set during World War II. As it frequently happens, research in support of one novel uncovers suggestions for a new and...
by Tom Clavin Kid Curry, born as Harvey Logan. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. It might be hard for some of you to believe that the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the title roles, premiered 55 years ago this week....
This piece is a response to our call for submissions, Celebrating Combahee at Fifty: Black Feminism, Socialism, Race, and Sexuality. For our submission guidelines, click here. The use of the wave metaphor for describing feminism has been criticized for suggesting...