Turning Okies Into New Dealers: How 1930s Technocrats Pushed Progressivism on Dust Bowl Refugees in Federal Farm Camps
In the midst of the Great Depression, punished by crippling drought and deepening poverty, hundreds of thousands of families left the Great Plains and the Southwest to look for work in California’s ri...
8 Feb 202438min
Whistle-Stop Tours: When Trains Ruled American Presidential Elections
For nearly two centuries, the beating heart of electoral politics was on the back of a train. William Jennings Bryan spoke to an estimated 5 million people from a train car in his 1896 presidential ca...
6 Feb 202436min
The Jewish Bankers Who Built Wall Street, Financed the American Century, and Spawned Countless Conspiracy Theories
Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabam...
1 Feb 202442min
The Ghost Army of World War 2
In the summer of 1944, a handpicked group of young GIs—including such future luminaries such as Bill Blass, Ellsworth Kelly, Arthur Singer, Victor Dowd, Art Kane, and Jack Masey—landed in France to co...
30 Jan 202441min
How Free Time Transformed From Strolls Through Aristocratic Gardens to Doomscrolling on TikTok
Free time, one of life’s most important commodities, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social medi...
25 Jan 202431min
Everyday Life In a War Zone: How To Live For Years With Air Raid Sirens and Tanks in the Street
What goes through the mind of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? When living in a warzone, such questions becom...
23 Jan 202435min
Behind the Bulldog: Winston Churchill's Public Image vs. Private Reality, Based on Those Who Knew Him
Winston Churchill remains one of the most revered figures of the twentieth century, his name a byword for courageous leadership. But the Churchill we know today is a mixture of history and myth, autho...
18 Jan 202437min
American Anarchy of the Early 1900s and The First U.S. War Against Domestic Extremists
In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, ana...
16 Jan 202440min
