One of the pleasures of reading Hillary Clinton in the News is the trip back to yesteryear to see the freaks and embarrassments who made up the American media’s infotainment […]
Category: american history
Release Party: Immigrant Identity and the Politics of Citizenship
The latest e-book in our trendsetting Common Threads series, Immigrant Identity and the Politics of Citizenship draws on decades of scholarship to provide the context for current discussions about immigration, a topic of national […]
The Socialist Mayor and the Industrialist
Frank Zeidler transformed Milwaukee during his three terms as mayor of the Wisconsin city. However, the kind of change that Zeidler, a member of the Socialist Party of America, brought […]
200 Years of Illinois: Follow that Bison
On July 15, 1805, William Rector undertook an important, if arduous, task. By government order, he was to survey the Buffalo Trace, also known as the Vincennes Trace, a makeshift […]
Q&A with Spider Web author Nick Fischer
Nick Fischer is Adjunct Research Fellow of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He answered some questions about his book Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism. […]
Release Party: Free Spirits
Often dismissed as a nineteenth-century curiosity, spiritualism in fact influenced the radical social and political movements of its time. Believers filled the ranks of the Free Democrats, agitated for land […]
Throwbacklist Thursday: Goils Were Goils and Men Were Men
Generally considered a bummer of epic proportions, the Great Depression nonetheless inspired a measure of nostalgia. Americans looked back to a simpler time, of lives unencumbered by food, employment, homes, […]
How ’bout a Nice Hawaiian Putsch?
For years, native Hawaiians had fought with a modest degree of success to maintain their autonomy. But in 1893, white businessmen—sugar magnates and the like—had taken control by tossing out […]
Throwbacklist Thursday: The Story of the Smiths
Often overlooked in the literature written about American families, the Smiths of Western New York nonetheless have a claim over the Rockefellers and Adamses and all the other subjects of […]
200 Years of Illinois: Union Forever
In 1862, as the Civil War raged and a Confederate victory seemed quite possible, many of the tensions unleashed by the war found a stage in Pekin. There, on June 25, […]
Truly the Greatest
A boxing legend but a towering American cultural figure, Muhammad Ali lived a life beyond adjectives, indeed beyond superlatives, and that’s just what he set out to do. Tributes to […]
Throwbacklist Thursday: Steel Away
The Stone Age had its cavepeople and thyroidal mammals, the Bronze Age its Hoplites and long poems, the Iron Age its hillforts and bog mummies. The Steel Age seldom gets […]