When Voting Was Public Early American voting was often public. In some places, voters announced their choices aloud, allowing neighbors, employers, and candidates to know exactly how they voted. Why Secrecy Became Important Public voting made pressure, intimidation, and vote buying easier. Political parties could sometimes tell whether voters kept their promises. Secret voting made
Why Your Vote Is Secret Read More »
The Story Most of Us Were Told Most of us grew up hearing the same explanation for summer vacation. Schools closed for several months because farm families needed their children home to work the fields. It sounds reasonable, and I believed some version of it for years because it has been repeated so often that
Who Really Gave America Summer Vacation? Read More »
When I Started Digging Deeper The more I started digging into the private life of Grover Cleveland, the more I realized the history I had learned barely scratched the surface. I knew him as the twenty-second and twenty-fourth president of the United States, the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms until Donald Trump repeated
Grover the Good: The Women Behind a President’s Carefully Polished Reputation Read More »
A System That Did Not Treat Us the Same As a young Black man coming of age during the Vietnam War, military service was more than a political debate taking place in Washington. It was hanging over the lives of young men my age. We knew that a letter from the Selective Service System could
The Draft Was Not Equal: Black Men and the Vietnam War Read More »
Whiteness Was More Than Skin Color One thing history taught me is that race in America has never been as simple as looking at somebody’s skin and deciding where they belong. The meaning of whiteness developed over time through law, politics, immigration, labor, property, and social custom. People we now casually place inside one racial
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The Experiment That Still Disturbs Me The Milgram experiment is one of those psychological studies that stays with you because it forces an uncomfortable question about ordinary human behavior. Psychologist Stanley Milgram began the research at Yale University in 1961, and the first major results were published in 1963. His work was influenced in part
How Far Will Ordinary People Go When Authority Says Continue? Read More »
The Joke That Opens a Bigger Conversation Sometimes somebody tells a joke that sounds ridiculous at first, but underneath the laughter there is a serious historical question worth examining. I heard one joke that said White people must not have been very original because Europeans crossed an entire ocean and then started putting “New” in
When Renaming Becomes a Form of Power Read More »
The Pattern Behind the Technology There is a pattern in the history of surveillance that deserves our attention. New methods of identification and monitoring are often introduced to solve legitimate problems involving crime, fraud, war, or public safety. Yet some of these methods first developed in places where governments had extraordinary power over the people
From Colonial Fingerprints to Predictive Policing: When Surveillance Comes Home Read More »
When the Supreme Court Approved Forced Sterilization Some chapters of American history are difficult to read because they force us to face what respected institutions once considered acceptable. In 1927, the United States Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell, a case involving a young Virginia woman named Carrie Buck. Virginia wanted to sterilize her under
When Medicine Took Away the Right to Choose Read More »
Introduction History often teaches us that government works through official titles, elected offices, and clearly defined lines of authority. Presidents appoint cabinet members, Congress passes laws, and judges interpret the Constitution. While that is how government is designed to function, the reality has often been far more complex. Throughout history, trusted friends, political allies, family