Newsroom

By Steven Diner There is extensive public discussion today about how colleges decide whom to admit and about the need for affirmative action to ensure minority access to higher education. Colleges today are ranked not only by academic selectivity but by their...

By Paul A. Lombardo I began my book Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell, with an account of my introduction to the Buck case in 1980, when I saw a newspaper story about a lawsuit brought by someone who had been...

By Wayne Wiegand In 1958, shortly after the Alabama Public Library Service Division acquired copies of a popular children’s book titled The Rabbits’ Wedding for statewide distribution through its bookmobiles, state lawmaker E. O. Eddins loudly objected. One of...

By Wayne Weigand Over the past 120 years, millions of American K-12 public school students have used their school libraries billions of times, yet we still know very little about the history of these ubiquitous educational institutions that over the decades...

By Lucy MaddoxFor anyone who sets out to write a history, the result of finishing such a project has to include a sense of incompleteness. There’s much the writer simply cannot know, but there’s also much the writer can’t include because it’s not sufficiently...

The Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) is not what it used to be. The good news is that it continues to produce the world’s most dominant arsenal, even while imposing less of a “burden” on the country than during the Cold War. The bad news is that waste, fraud...

Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was the head of the Bureau of Chemistry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the precursor of today’s Food and Drug Administration. He is best remembered today as an important force behind the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act...

He collected. They paid. She sued. Works of history routinely contain phrases like these. When I began studying women’s legal activities in eighteenth-century New England, I too wrote sentences with these sorts of verbs—active, yet simultaneously vague. I...

The anticipation of anniversaries of significant events have often stimulated authors to focus attention on the event or personalities to be celebrated or commemorated. Usually the sequence of these anniversaries occurs every fifty years or so after the...

Between 1945 and 1991, dozens of American and Soviet journalists moved to the capital cities of Communism and Capitalism to report on the rival superpower. They wanted to understand a country that appeared to stand against everything that they held dear and...