Plessy v. Ferguson, was decided in May of 1896, by a vote of seven to one. It held that the State of Louisiana could lawfully require railroads to provide what the statute called "equal but separate accommodations” for white and Black people, and that a passenger who refused to sit in the car assigned to their race could be prosecuted as a criminal. 

In 1830, afraid that white missionaries were aiding the Cherokee in their effort to resist giving up their lands, the Georgia state government made it illegal for white people to live within Cherokee Nation  territory without a license from the government.  Samuel Austin Worcester - raised in Vermont and trained as a Congregationalist minister - had lived for years with the Cherokee and became close with the Cherokee leadership.

In 1942, the U.S. government rounded up citizens and forced them into concentration camps. Between the two countries, over 140,000 people were removed from their home and interned without legal recourse. In many cases, their captors--the U.S. military--sold off their houses, businesses, and belongings for a fraction of their worth, or their former neighbors simply took what they wanted. Many, many scholars have demonstrated that the forced internment of Japanese American internment camps was racially motivated.

In August 1895, a ship docks in San Francisco carrying a cook named Wong Kim Ark — born in that very city, armed with an airtight certificate proving it. The customs collector refuses to let him off anyway. What follows is a four-month standoff in the harbor, a Supreme Court case that will define what "American" means, and a legal argument that never really died.

In the spring of 1966, inside a rented office space in New York City that smelled like cigarette smoke and mimeograph ink, a cadre of people worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pronounced “snick.” SNCC was one of many organizations, such as CORE, the SCLC, the NAACP, and others, working for the Civil Right Movement in the South. It had been a harrowing few years.

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court released one of its most important and revolutionary rulings: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, usually better known as Brown v. Board. The ruling overturned the infamous ruling in Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that established the ‘separate but equal’ precedent that made Jim Crow discrimination legal. The Brown ruling required that the federal government integrate public schools, bringing white and Black children together to receive equal education.

Community members face retaliation for trying to spread the word out, a lawsuit alleges.

Podcast Episode · Dig: A History Podcast · 02/09/2026 · 50m

Erecting the Pulpit examines a powerful yet overlooked form of Christian Nationalism-one that fuses faith, masculinity, capitalism, and political power under th…

In this pugnacious exposé, Hall (Laughing at the Devil), an associate professor at Duke Divinity School, incisively explores the...

In 1590, the king of Scotland fomented a witch hunt in North Berwick, implicating as many as 200 people, convicting 70, and executing as many as 50. He participated in the “questioning” of the accused, tearing confessions of treason and weather magic from their trembling lips. He sent those whom he “believed” conspired against him to their deaths. Why? Reading his witch-hunting treatise, Demonologie, one might assume it was because he feared the threat that magic-users posed to his country.

When we tell the story of AIDS— and we tell it more often now, in films and museums and classrooms— we tend to tell it as a story about gay men. And of course it was, overwhelmingly, a catastrophe that fell on gay men. But standing right beside those men, and very often holding them as they died, were lesbians. They organized.

Today, in our last episode of our Cold War series, we are exploring the Cold War roots of the modern conservative movement. We’ll trace the arc of the grassroots movement from the 1950s up to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, getting a glimpse at how the conservative movement began to move away from moderate, mainstream Republicanism. And we will see how women were central to the movement's organizational and political success. 

During the Lavender Scare, the US government fired hundreds (but possibly thousands) of civil servants for being gay or lesbian, ostensibly because of a Communist-panic in which Americans were convinced a homosexual could be blackmailed into giving up state secrets to those rascally Soviets. Turns out, though they weren’t particularly successful at it, the Soviets did try to use sex scandals of all kinds to cultivate spies from the “West” -- including, but not limited to, queer Westerners traveling or working in the USSR.

In this episode, we uncover the extraordinary story of John Scott, a twenty-year-old American idealist who abandoned the University of Wisconsin during the Great Depression, taught himself to weld, and boarded a train for the Soviet Union. He would spend nearly a decade in Magnitogorsk, Stalin's new “City of Steel” in the Urals, building blast furnaces, marrying a Russian woman, and slowly, painfully watching his idealism curdle under the pressure of Stalinist terror.

Rachel Carson is often touted as inspiring the modern global environmental movement. In 1962, when Carson’s book Silent Spring was published, she was a fifty-five-year-old former government employee and an award-winning writer of oceanography books. She did not hold a university position, had no PhD, nor was she affiliated with any political organization. She did not consider herself a feminist, and by most accounts she had little taste for public controversy.

In the mid-1970s, parents in Niagara Falls, New York were struggling to figure out why their children were getting mysteriously ill. For two years, officials from the state had been investigating the environment in Niagara Falls For years, residents had been complaining about “the odors of chemicals and fumes.” By the mid-70s, officials had determined that the smells emanated from an old ditch-turned-toxic waste dump.

Since the 1970s, oil and gas companies have been trying to stick their drills in the Arctic coastal plain. Resistance has been persistent and multi-faceted. Environmental conservationist organizations like Sierra Club have testified before Congress and organized letter-writing campaigns, filmmakers have documented what will be lost if drilling is allowed, and grassroots activists have done everything in their power to raise awareness about the importance of protecting the Arctic Refuge from corporate greed and destruction.

In 1851, a journalist named Henry Mayhew set out to document the lives of London's working poor. What he found was astonishing. In the richest city in the world, thousands of people made their living by picking through other people's trash. There were the bone-grubbers, who scavenged bones from gutters to sell to soap manufacturers. There were the mudlarks, mostly children, who waded through the filthy banks of the Thames searching for coal, rope, and bits of metal.

This year, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the moment when American patriots pledged their lives and their sacred honor to declare the American colonies independent of the British crown. By the time the Continental Congress signed that document, American blood had already been shed and the colonies were already fighting the war that would ultimately lead to the birth of the United States as an independent nation.

This year, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the moment when American patriots pledged their lives and their sacred honor to declare the American colonies independent of the British crown. By the time the Continental Congress signed that document, American blood had already been shed and the colonies were already fighting the war that would ultimately lead to the birth of the United States as an independent nation.

Yule logs, dried orange slices strung across your windows, decorated trees and simmer pots - all the marks of a neopagan holiday season! Wait, that's Christmas, you say? Well, can't it be both? A brief history of modern witchcraft, just in time for the winter solstice celebration. Orange Slices, Simmer Pots, and Naked Dancing: A Brief and Incomplete History of Modern Witchcraft…

Over an eight-month period in 1896-1897, thousands of people across North America reported seeing mysterious ships in the air or lights in the sky. There were over 12,000 newspaper accounts published about the phenomenon in 408 different newspapers in 41 American states and six Canadian provinces. The airships were usually described as oblong, cigar-shaped objects, sometimes with wings that would flap up and down.

In 1220 CE, St. Francis of Assisi tamed a ferocious werewolf terrorizing Gubbio, Italy—transforming "Brother Wolf" from savage beast to peaceful townsperson. But why did Christianity need to conquer the wolf? For millennia, werewolves have stalked the boundaries between civilization and savagery, humanity and monstrosity. From ancient Mesopotamian curses to Greek myths of divine punishment, from medieval theology to early modern courtrooms where hundreds died in werewolf trials, the shape-shifter has embodied our deepest anxieties about human nature itself.

The Page Act of 1875 forbade the entry of Chinese women based on assumptions of immorality and was the first restrictive federal immigration law in the United States.

YouTube video by princessplalu

If you look through recordings of country, western, and folk music ranging from the 1920s and 1930s through to present, you’ll notice a theme: songs about crime, murder, and executions are ever-present. From Grayson & Whittier’s recording of the centuries-old ballad “Rose Connelly” in 1927, to Lloyd Wilson’s “Stagger Lee”recorded in the 1950s, Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”in the 1960s, to Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone”in the 1990s, to Jason Isbell’s “Live Oak” or “Yvette”or Zach Bryan’s “Birmingham” in more recent years, songs about the murder are a staple of the American musical tradition.

Harry Kellar was an American magician born in Erie, Pa.

How would you expect the Spanish Inquisition to treat a confessed witch? Does the suggestion conjure visions of fire, torture, and lots of murdered women? You aren’t alone - but this is a history we definitely need to unpack.  Transcript for: Suffer a Witch to Live? Religious Conflict and Witchcraft Persecutions; or, No One Expects the Inquisition Researched and written by Averill Earls, PhD…