Shin-Kickers From History:Celebrate People’s History

The Celebrate People’s History project began in 1998. In the dead of the night, activist Josh MacPhee, aided by a half-dozen co-conspirators, pasted images of Malcolm X on boarded-up storefronts in Chicago’s West Side. Ten minutes after they started, they had attracted a small crowd of neighborhood residents. Some of them helped put up posters.…

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Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Bonus Expeditionary Forces March on Washington

And while we’re talking about failures of compassion and the Great Depression, as I believe we were, consider the example of the Bonus Expeditionary Forces’ march on Washington—a story with uncomfortable modern-day echoes Bonus payments to World War I veterans were a hot political subject in the years after 1919. Congress passed bills approving bonuses…

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The Paradox of Herbert Hoover

If there is one thing I have learned over and over in the years that I’ve been writing History in the Margins it is that the history “everyone” knows is often wrong, or at best sadly incomplete. That’s as true for a professional historian, once she opens the gate and wanders out of her field,…

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