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Labor & Business

Reviews

Framing Resistance

By Josthin Amado | April 26, 2025

Loiselle provides insight and inspiration for reimagining solidarity.

Hometown Histories

The Shadow Of Chemical Valley

By Spencer Roberts | October 29, 2024

Sarnia has been growing and dying in cycles for a hundred years.

Shorts

A Profession, If You Can Keep It

By Erin Bartram | January 7, 2023

Imagined meritocracies mean little to extractive institutions.

History & Mystery

The Mystery of the Social-Climbing Copywriter

By Dave Kamper | December 22, 2022

Smoke your way to a peaceful working-class life.

Features

The Dentist Who Defrauded Two Governments—and a Historian, Part II

By David McKenzie | October 1, 2022

What happens when forged documents enter the historical record?

Features

The Dentist Who Defrauded Two Governments—and a Historian, Part I

By David McKenzie | September 25, 2022

What happens when forged documents enter the historical record?

How I Do History

How Allison Horrocks Does History

By Contingent Magazine | February 9, 2022

“. . . if a wide brimmed Stetson gets us going, I’m content to start there.”

Features

Strange Beasts of Columbia

By Eduardo Vergara Torres | January 1, 2022

We stand together and we will not give up.

A Thing Of The Past

The Government Pen

By Nick Delehanty | December 13, 2021

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

By Sara S. Goek | October 3, 2021

Pick any stretch of road and you can find along it a history of the nation.

Difficult Topographies

By Sam Coren | May 4, 2021

There are whole hidden worlds pressing into this one.

Shorts

How To Make An Oligopoly

By Brittany McWilliams | April 17, 2021

A seven-point memo proposing control of the global insulin market.

Features

Ground Operations

By Josh Carmony | March 22, 2021

I had already completed my freshman year when I first learned what an adjunct was.

How I Do History

How Aimee Loiselle Does History

By Contingent Magazine | February 23, 2021

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

By Frankie Urrutia-Smith | December 26, 2020

Jell-O remains an easy, popular way to enter the domestic realm.

Personal Pan Histories

Personal Pan Histories: Wilbur Buds

By Adam Shapiro | December 23, 2020

It was the only dark chocolate my grandmother liked.

Personal Pan Histories

Personal Pan Histories: Wacky Cake

By Nicole Welk-Joerger | December 18, 2020

A cake made without milk or butter? Don’t tell the Minnesota Dairy Industry Committee!

Personal Pan Histories

Personal Pan Histories: Stuffed Cabbage

By Lauren Golder | December 16, 2020

My great-grandmother Sylvia’s stuffed cabbage held an out-sized role in my culinary imagination.

Personal Pan Histories

Personal Pan Histories: Instant Noodles

By Xiao Dong | December 10, 2020

As a picky eater, I ate oodles of instant noodles growing up.

Shorts

Looking for Locherville

By Ramya Swayamprakash | November 4, 2020

In 1908, there was a village on an island, cut off from the world.

How I Do History

How Chris Deutsch Does History

By Contingent Magazine | September 3, 2020

“No one listens unless we tell a good story, so we try to tell good stories.”

Shorts

How-to Booke

By Cynthia Green | August 28, 2020

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

By Aram Sarkisian | August 8, 2020

She was there to promote a way of life that little resembled her own.

Shorts

Bowling For Suburbia

By Kate Reggev | May 8, 2020

By adopting middle-class aesthetics, the bar-basement bowling alley became the “poor man’s country club.”

Features

An Interrupted Journey

By Ruth Almy | April 3, 2020

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

By Charles Louis Richter | March 31, 2020

Though the “electricity biscuit” thesis is plausible, killjoy historians need more evidence.

Shorts

Bats and Snakes and Dogs and Things Like That

By Christopher Deutsch | March 19, 2020

Regulation, not culture, is the key to understanding the novel coronavirus.

Shorts

This Is A Permanent Book

By Karin Falcone Krieger | February 23, 2020

Behind Dover Publications’ eclectic 10,000-title catalog lies a remarkable story of 20th century innovation.

Features

The Life And Times Of Mr. Peanut

By Rachel Kirby | February 13, 2020

Mr. Peanut embodies two seemingly-distinct but deeply-connected Virginian worlds.

Shorts

The Work of Getting Clean

By Jeremy Milloy | January 13, 2020

“An ex-addict without employment is an ex-addict without cure.” Or so the mantra went.

Field Trip

Of Strip Mines and Coal Slurry

By Ryan Tate | August 31, 2019

I’d spent years living simultaneously inside the West and outside of it.

A black-and-white photograph of an African-American man surrounded by a crowd of white women, one of whom has her face and hand pressed into his chest.
Reviews

The Women Who Showed Us Life

By Joanna Scutts | July 31, 2019

Over its four-decade run, LIFE Magazine had 105 staff photographers. Six of them were women.

Reviews

Overfishing Is a Choice

By Blake Earle | May 1, 2019

The industry isn’t driven by consumer demand alone.

Shorts

Selling Angola

By Holly Genovese | March 15, 2019

It is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. So who is going to its gift shop, and why?

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