History (4,911 posts)

Volume 34, Issue 4, July 2025
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In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the journalist broke free of his contrarian clichés to illuminate the origins of 1960s counterculture. Above: Jerry Garcia and Rock Scully, of the Grateful Dead, speak to Tom Wolfe at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, 1966.

Women’s peace camp, Greenham Common, 12 December 1982

The promises of the Prozac century have fallen short; the number of novel, therapeutically significant medications successfully completing development shrinks every year; and the demand for better treatments constantly grows. Answering these hardships is a renewed optimism concerning the efficacy of controlled psychedelic therapy, a renaissance that has seen the resurgence of a familiar concept: intoxication as model psychosis. And yet, little has been made of where this peculiar idea originates. Why did we come to liken psychosis to intoxication, and why is this an idea we find so hard to shake?

In what he termed a “labor aristocracy,” Eric Hobsbawm saw echoes of what Marx and Engels had described. Hobsbawm posited that the anti-socialist, “workerist” tradition of union politics in the United States and the UK may be reflective of a powerful, elite layer of workers in the two countries’ labor markets. These white, often Protestant, male workers were comparatively highly paid and benefited from their position in capitalist production. Their rather advantaged market position put them at odds with more precarious workers who were more likely to advance universalistic programs for political transformation. Above: Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, December 1920

Dorothea Lange, “Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle,” June 1938.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, published in 1906, remains one of the most widely known pieces of realist literature from the early 20th century. An expose of the brutal exploitation of immigrant workers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, told through the struggles of Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and his family, The Jungle—both as a novel and as a work of investigative journalism—takes on renewed importance today with rising levels of workplace death and injury, and amidst workers’ fightback for independent control of workplace safety through the independent investigation into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. initiated by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).

Alice Austen’s body of work is considered among the earliest and most prolific by a female photographer. Long viewed as an amateur because she pursued the craft predominantly as a hobby, she is now recognized for her significant contributions to the canon of American photography.

The UN Charter being signed by a delegation at a ceremony held at the Veterans’ War Memorial Building on 26 June 1945.

Navajo students before and after entering the Carlisle Indian School in 1882.

Figure 4. ‘Miss E. M. Brace showing the children how to thin out plants’, Australian Town and Country Journal, 6 June 1917, 28. State Library of New South Wales.

Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later. Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as “Juneteenth,” by the newly freed people in Texas. Above: Emancipation Day celebration, June 19, 1900 held in “East Woods” on East 24th Street in Austin.

There is a direct path from the Unite the Right rally of August 12, 2017, to the Stop the Steal insurrection of January 6, 2021. As I researched this book, many more towns and cities in America began seeing armed vigilantes staging rallies and protests, protecting their God-given right to this or that, including their right to threaten unarmed people. Much like school shootings, these clashes began to seem par for the course. The dark money seeding their efforts has found its way into our national politics. I watched the governor of Virginia declare war on “divisive history,” while African American fiction and history and young adult books touching on queer sexuality were removed from library shelves.

Reading about book bans in the US, I couldn’t help but see the parallels. The battle between those arguing for diversity and LGBTQ representation in children’s books, against those who want to remove them from school bookshelves and public libraries, was all too familiar to anyone who had grown up in the UK. Back in 1983, British newspaper, The Daily Mail, brought a scandal to their readers’ attention.

As a parable from the past to help us come to grips with our perilous present, you could do worse than screen Storm Warning, the 1951 noir that may be the most unlikely Klan movie ever made.

In the eighth essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series, Pepper Stetler explores the troubling history of IQ tests and special education.