Annette Gordon-Reed

On the Trail Blazed by W.E.B. Du Bois

“Writing, teaching, activism, organizing—he did everything. And I feel a responsibility, or desire, to reach as many people as I can with my writing that grows out of my interest in the Black struggle.”

August 28, 2021

The Color Line

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present a “graphical narrative” of the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert

Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition

edited by Julian Rothenstein, with an introduction by Jacqueline Francis and Stephen G. Hall

A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication

by Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer

August 19, 2021 issue

Hopes for the American Experiment

November 19, 2020 issue

Rebellious History

How should historians construct a more complete and truthful version of the past?

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

by Saidiya Hartman

October 22, 2020 issue

A message chalked on the road during a demonstration protesting the police shooting death of Philando Castile after a traffic stop, St. Paul, Minnesota, July 7, 2016

People Living While Black & the Police

There is no doubt that our country’s troubled racial history has helped shape current attitudes. It should not surprise us that the police more often apply that discretion to black people in degrading and dangerous ways.

June 13, 2020

The Real Texas

People go to Texas seeking fortunes, hoping to find a place somewhere between what is real and what is myth; it is strange and disturbing that this hope resembles the feeling that brought Anglo settlers, along with the people they enslaved, into the region so long ago.

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

by Larry McMurtry, with an introduction by Diana Ossana

God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State

by Lawrence Wright

The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas

by Monica Muñoz Martinez

Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas

by Stephen Harrigan

America’s Lone Star Constitution: How Supreme Court Cases from Texas Shape the Nation

by Lucas A. Powe Jr.

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October 24, 2019 issue

Hank Willis Thomas: In a Non-Violent Movement, Unmerited Suffering Is Redemptive, from the installation Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around, 2016. The image appears in the book Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal, just published by Aperture and the Portland Art Museum, with an exhibition to follow next year. The original photograph is by Spider Martin, 1965.

MLK: What We Lost

Figures like Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks have now become “safe” in ways they never were when they were operating at the height of their powers.

To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice

by Michael K. Honey

Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours

by Joseph Rosenbloom

The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

by Jason Sokol

The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age

by Patrick Parr

To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry

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November 8, 2018 issue

Hillary Clinton on television during her first presidential debate with Donald Trump, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, September 2016

Female Trouble

‘What Happened’ by Hillary Rodham Clinton

What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

February 8, 2018 issue

White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and members of the alt-right, encircle counterprotestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus, Charlottesville, Virginia, August 11, 2017

Jefferson & Charlottesville

Americans have been trying to claim, or use, Thomas Jefferson in one way or another from the time of his death in 1826 up until this very moment.

August 19, 2017

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiating at the wedding of David Hagedorn and Michael Widomski, Washington, D.C., 2013

Our Trouble with Sex: A Christian Story?

Geoffrey Stone’s ‘Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the 21st Century’

Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century

by Geoffrey R. Stone

August 17, 2017 issue

The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame

On the origins of racial exclusion in the society that would become the United States of America.

The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution

by Robert Parkinson

January 19, 2017 issue