Mailbag
Why Write Historical Fiction?
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I wanted to understand a hidden part of my own family’s history.
Hometown Histories
The Shadow Of Chemical Valley
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Sarnia has been growing and dying in cycles for a hundred years.
Shorts
A Profession, If You Can Keep It
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Imagined meritocracies mean little to extractive institutions.
History & Mystery
The Mystery of the Social-Climbing Copywriter
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Smoke your way to a peaceful working-class life.
Features
The Dentist Who Defrauded Two Governments—and a Historian, Part II
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What happens when forged documents enter the historical record?
Features
The Dentist Who Defrauded Two Governments—and a Historian, Part I
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What happens when forged documents enter the historical record?
How I Do History
How Allison Horrocks Does History
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“. . . if a wide brimmed Stetson gets us going, I’m content to start there.”
A Thing Of The Past
The Government Pen
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As a child, I thought it was extremely cool that working for the U.S. government meant that you could get a pen that said “U.S. Government.”
Shorts
On The Road With The WPA
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Pick any stretch of road and you can find along it a history of the nation.
Shorts
How To Make An Oligopoly
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A seven-point memo proposing control of the global insulin market.
Features
Ground Operations
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I had already completed my freshman year when I first learned what an adjunct was.
How I Do History
How Aimee Loiselle Does History
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An unexpected job opportunity launched seven years of adjunct teaching and rekindled Aimee Loiselle’s interest in scholarly history.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Jell-O
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Jell-O remains an easy, popular way to enter the domestic realm.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Wilbur Buds
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It was the only dark chocolate my grandmother liked.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Wacky Cake
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A cake made without milk or butter? Don’t tell the Minnesota Dairy Industry Committee!
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Stuffed Cabbage
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My great-grandmother Sylvia’s stuffed cabbage held an out-sized role in my culinary imagination.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Instant Noodles
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As a picky eater, I ate oodles of instant noodles growing up.
How I Do History
How Chris Deutsch Does History
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“No one listens unless we tell a good story, so we try to tell good stories.”
Shorts
How-to Booke
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How-to books, including those which promise the secret to wealth, are not a modern invention.
Shorts
Selling Splitnik; or, Aunt Olga Goes to Moscow
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She was there to promote a way of life that little resembled her own.
Shorts
Bowling For Suburbia
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By adopting middle-class aesthetics, the bar-basement bowling alley became the “poor man’s country club.”
Features
An Interrupted Journey
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In 1908, Canada tried to deport the South Asian population of Vancouver. But the community stood its ground and won.
Shorts
The Trouble with Triscuits
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Though the “electricity biscuit” thesis is plausible, killjoy historians need more evidence.
Shorts
Bats and Snakes and Dogs and Things Like That
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Regulation, not culture, is the key to understanding the novel coronavirus.
Shorts
This Is A Permanent Book
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Behind Dover Publications’ eclectic 10,000-title catalog lies a remarkable story of 20th century innovation.
Features
The Life And Times Of Mr. Peanut
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Mr. Peanut embodies two seemingly-distinct but deeply-connected Virginian worlds.
Shorts
The Work of Getting Clean
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“An ex-addict without employment is an ex-addict without cure.” Or so the mantra went.
Field Trip
Of Strip Mines and Coal Slurry
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I’d spent years living simultaneously inside the West and outside of it.
Reviews
The Women Who Showed Us Life
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Over its four-decade run, LIFE Magazine had 105 staff photographers. Six of them were women.
Shorts
Selling Angola
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It is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. So who is going to its gift shop, and why?