History News Network (US)

Even if only semi-consciously, Donald Trump recognized in 2015 that a narrative void had been presented by the hubristic failures of the post-Cold War political establishment in America and throughout much of the world. He filled the void by offering the Make America Great Again ethos, shouting that the woes of “the forgotten men and women” were owed to “stupid” and evil elites across the political spectrum who had embraced nefarious open border and trade policies.

The early summer of 1913 found the new U.S. commissioner general of immigration, a somewhat rumpled man with a drooping walrus mustache named Anthony Caminetti, agonizing over how to fix what he considered serious problems at the nation’s borders. The number of immigration inspectors, doctors, and interpreters, he quickly discerned, was “wholly inadequate” to what was needed to curb an alarmingly large number of immigrants entering the country.

When President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital in August 2025, temporarily transferring control of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to the U.S. attorney general, many commentators declared the move to be an unprecedented federalization of local police power in Washington, DC. In a strictly legal sense, this is true.

On the night of March 10, 1948, the main building of Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, mysteriously caught fire. The hospital kitchen was found aflame around 11:35 p.m. While staff woke and evacuated most patients, smoke and flames rose through the dumbwaiters, preventing rescue efforts on the upper floors. Attempts to enter the hospital from the outside were stymied by windows reinforced to discourage patient escapes.

Amidst the widespread fallout from the 2024 presidential election, it hardly registered as news when Alabama’s state education board proposed new social studies standards for the first time in 14 years. In a moment when red states were rushing to ban “critical race theory” and “divisive concepts,” Alabama’s new guidelines for K-12 education were praised by Democratic members of the State Board of Education and aroused little public criticism.

For over a century, U.S. politicians have made condemning student protestors a key feature of their rhetoric.

Several years ago, I was involved in some research that led me to the back catalog of Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping. Flipping through every issue of both magazinespublished between 1949 and 1960, I was often startled by jump-scare recipes for savory Jell-O salads. Few things are more terrifying to me than the phrase “man-pleasing molded salads.” Epidemic polio is one of them, and as evidenced in the magazines’ pages, the 1950s had plenty of that, too.

The annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) is rarely an occasion that sparks intense controversy, but this year’s gathering of historians proved to be an exception. At the business meeting on January 6, 2025, AHA members overwhelmingly passed (428 to 88) a resolution condemning Israel’s “scholasticide” — i.e., intentional decimation of educational and archival infrastructure — in Gaza.

The magistrate’s penmanship is beginning to blotch. He’s setting down the events of a few nights ago, “while the whole of the transaction is fresh in [his] memory”: of hundreds of protestors destroying a turnpike and tollhouse, as he and ten men rush to confront them. Facing the protestors, he’s on his third attempt to get a pistol to fire — it’s dewy, after midnight, the powder too damp — and, once again, he’s about to be trampled by a rioter on horseback.

In late October 2024, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer attended his first “Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.” At the summit, which took place in Samoa, the issue of reparations for Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade dominated many conversations. Advocates of reparations spoke powerfully about how slavery fueled the expansion of empire while devastating communities and families who were shipped halfway around the world for their labor to be exploited.