Roundup

Meet Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the black woman who invented that rock and roll sound

by Alexis Madrigal

“She did incredible picking. That’s what attracted Elvis to her.”

The first black adolescent to become a millionaire

by Steve Gerkin

Historical records conflict over the issue of the first black female millionaire, though Sarah Rector was the first black adolescent to achieve millionaire status, hands down. Her road to riches involved mandated endowment, racial triumph, and good fortune.

When The KKK Was Mainstream

by Linton Weeks

Wait a minute. The Ku Klux Klan once had a baseball team?

Building an Underclass

by Benjamin Schwarz

How urban planners helped demolish Britain’s working families

What Is Deism?

by Thomas Kidd

Most deists really did consider themselves serious theists, and many considered themselves devotees of Jesus and his teachings. Their deism was not just a convenient cloak for atheism.

Murky waters: partisanship and foreign policy

by Lewis L. Gould

It’s time to retire the hoary phrase about politics and the water’s edge. It was never a guiding principle of American foreign policy before 1900.

Plan Bibi

by Andrew Meyer

The most recent Israeli election compels Zionists to examine our principles.

Turncoats We Have Known

by Rick Perlstein

How leftists turned into rightists: they projected their own extremism onto the entire left and thus became conservative heroes.

Sanitizing the Nakba, in ‘The New York Times Book Review’

by Liz Rose

Critics say the NYT is continuing to downplay the Nakba.

What happens when inmates write a history of their own prison?

by Rebecca Onion

Inmates at America’s oldest women’s prison are writing a history of it—and exploding the myth of its benevolent founders.

American Ignorance

by Sanford J. Ungar

Among all the seemingly intractable crises Americans face in the world today, none is so serious as their utter unfamiliarity with that world. It makes every specific overseas problem virtually impossible for us to deal with confidently or competently.

Antebellum Data Journalism: Or, How Big Data Busted Abe Lincoln

by Scott Klein

The real history of data journalism pre-dates newspapers, and traces the history of news itself.

Fight for black voting rights precedes the Constitution

by Van Gosse

In Boston and New York, leaders like John Hancock and Aaron Burr actively recruited “electors of color” after the American Revolution.

From Sharpeville to San Francisco and back again

by Peter Cole

The history behind the name "Human Rights Day"is one of a larger and longer battle for equal rights and justice for all human beings.

Roundup Top 10!

This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editors of HNN.

The New American Order

by Tom Engelhardt

1% Elections, The Privatization of the State, a Fourth Branch of Government, and the Demobilization of "We the People"

Israel votes Apartheid

by Neve Gordon

"At least now there will be no liberal Zionist façade, camouflaging Israel’s unwillingness to dismantle its colonial project "

Hillary and Historians

by Jeffrey Frank

The email controversy is really about the obstruction of history, the deletion of America’s past, intentional or not.

Putting a Woman on the $20 Bill

Which woman would you pick? 

How humans became human

by Avi Tuschman

In an international bestseller Youval Harari lays out a grand new history of our species focusing on 3 major revolutions: Cognitive Revolution, Agricultural Revolution, Scientific Revolution.