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Byline: Caleb Crain An Accidental Activist The gay-rights movement's unradical pioneer. tifIllustration by Mike McQuade / Source: Kay Tobin � the New York Public LibraryFrank Kameny's crusade against discrimination began [...]

Byline: Caleb Crain City Limits What a white-supremacist coup looks like. tifIllustration by Bill BraggAfter burning down the office of a black newspaper, participants posed outside.67 On November 10, 1898, [...]

Byline: Caleb Crain State of the Unions What happened to America's labor movement? tifIllustration by Rose WongSince the fifties, the proportion of union members in the labor force has declined [...]

Byline: Caleb Crain Merchants of Doom Is capitalism a threat to democracy? tifIllustration by Alvaro Dominguez; photograph from iStock / GettyA new book blames authoritarianism on politicians entranced by the [...]

Byline: Caleb Crain None of the Above The case against democracy. Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan 'From each according to his ability to each [...]

Byline: BY CALEB CRAIN LOST ILLUSIONS The Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War. On the morning of February 27, 1937, which began cold and gray, a few hundred [...]

FOUR LEGS GOOD BY CALEB CRAIN The life of Jack London. London's tales of nature and survival made new kinds of cruelty available to fiction. Jack London never felt that [...]

Can history explain anything? Henry Adams, after a lifetime of writing about American history, wasn't sure that it could. 'Historians undertake to arrange sequences,--called stories, or histories,--assuming in silence a [...]

What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two. 'One side of the face blazed of [...]

"I want to find out why I'm working," Cary Grant tells Katharine Hepburn in "Holiday." Grant's character, a grocer's son who put himself through Harvard, wants to take time off [...]

In the spring of 1914, members of the Colorado National Guard machine-gunned and set fire to tents in Ludlow, Colorado, where striking miners were living with their families. Five miners, [...]

In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began […]

If, under the spell of 'Moby-Dick,' you decided to run away to the modern equivalent of whaling, where would you go? Because petroleum displaced whale oil as a source of […]

By late 1814, it was clear that America was not winning the War of 1812. Washington, including the Capitol and the White House, was in ashes. New Englanders were so [...]

On January 30, 1937, a letter to the New Statesman and Nation announced that Darwin, Marx, and Freud had a successor--or, more accurately, successors. 'Mass-Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology, [...]

In William Dean Howells's 1890 novel 'A Hazard of New Fortunes,' an old German socialist named Lindau rails against capitalism so bitterly that he upsets a friend. Lindau apologizes, saying [...]

At the age of seven, Abraham Lincoln poked his rifle through a crack in the family's log cabin and shot a turkey. It was the high point of his career [...]