Current Events that Relate to History
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Comment
The Declaration of Independence and the Rule of Law
The Founders' ideas of where law comes from, and who does and does not have the authority to make it, can guide us today as our grievances parallel theirs.National Affairs -
Book Review
The Forgotten Founder
How did we forget the man who coined ‘We the People’?The Dispatch -
Book Review
Banquo’s Ghost: The Contradictions of the American Revolution
A review of Joseph Ellis's reassessment of the Founding, arguing that slavery and Indigenous dispossession were central contradictions of 1776.The Nation -
Book Review
The Spirit of ’76
What is living and what is dead in our memory of the American Revolution.Boston Review -
Dispatch
The Battle of Little Bighorn and Why It Never Ends
Custer’s last stand was 150 years ago. As America wrestles with its 250th birthday, this commemoration also cuts to the heart of who we are.Washington Monthly -
Longread
Happy F***ing Birthday
An exhausted America turns two hundred and fifty.Harper’s -
exhibit
The Many Faces of Nativism
As this exhibit shows, anti-immigrant sentiment has been a throughline of American history.
From the HNN Archive
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Newsletter Features
Birthright Citizenship Existed Before the Fourteenth Amendment
The idea that citizenship extends to everyone born on U.S. soil has precedents stretching back to the Founding. -
Newsletter Features
Declaring “Revolution”
Even after the fighting started, it took years before American Patriots started calling their cause a “revolution.” -
Excerpts
The Bicentennial Made American History Look Ridiculous
Many Americans felt the U.S. had failed to live up to its ideals on its 200th anniversary. They hoped it might improve by the Declaration’s next big celebration. -
Newsletter Features
An Appeal for Inaction
On the United States’ 150th birthday, Calvin Coolidge said that the country’s work was done. Not everyone agreed. -
Newsletter Features
What Has His Billion Dollars Made of Him?
Finding shades of Elon Musk in Upton Sinclair’s 1937 novel about Henry Ford. -
Newsletter Features
Reading Playboy for the History
A historian stumbles upon an article that provides a fascinating glimpse into how the world thought about witchcraft and sex in 1963.