Justice

A Red-Black alliance defended political prisoners and drew attention to death and prison sentences disproportionately handed out to people of color.

Emancipation Days symbolized America’s attempt to free the enslaved across the nation. But those days were unable to prevent new forms of economic slavery.

Five months before his assassination in 1978, Harvey Milk called on the president of the United States to defend the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.

The Supreme Court’s expanding interpretation of the Second Amendment threatens longstanding democratic authority to enact gun safety measures.

Officials have described the recent shooting as an aberration in the “City of Good Neighbors.” But this conceals the city’s long-standing racial divisions.

And Congress should claw it back.

In 1790, Philadelphia opened the first American penitentiary, with the US's first solitary cells. Black people were disproportionately punished from the start.

As the Cherokee Nation’s first female chief’s image is minted onto a coin, her full humanity should be examined.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made reference to the legal opinions of English jurist Henry de Bracton, foreshadowing the court overturning Roe v. Wade.

A two-volume biography tracks the life and times of one of Harlem’s leading socialists.

Contrary to contemporary claims, Susan B. Anthony and her peers rarely discussed abortion, which only emerged as a key political issue in the 1960s.

This isn’t the first time the U.S. Postal Service has played a role in curbing women’s reproductive rights.

A conversation with historian Donna Murch about the past, present, and future of Black radical organizing.

The two may seem unconnected, but a centuries-long history of panic about White birth rates binds them together.

How a 37-word clause tucked inside a new education legislation reshape women’s sports forever.

The controversy between players and owners frequently brought baseball into the federal courts between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries.

The 1954 Supreme Court ruling was hailed as a victory for desegregation. But protracted white resistance decimated the pipeline of Black principals and teachers.

In “Captives,” former Rikers detainee Jarrod Shanahan traces the history of New York City’s sprawling jail complex, and its centrality to brutal class struggle.

New laws regarding transgender youth are based on the assumption that the gender binary is natural.

An accounting of racist murders in nineteenth-century America.

During the 2010s, violent attacks by white supremacists and other extremists increased, including at a church in Charleston, S.C. and a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

The Gray Panthers empowered elderly people to see themselves as experts capable of disentangling convoluted bureaucracies.

Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century jurist, has been endlessly quoted by American judges and lawyers, with awful repercussions for women.

The struggle for progress is always two steps forward and at least one step back.

To take away the right to privacy is to take a giant step backward in American history.

What my father saw in Mississippi.

The originalist case for lifting abortion restrictions.

The bad history in Alito’s draft overturning Roe v. Wade.

Black Americans continue to fight for access to the public school systems their forebears created, against a history of white backlash and appropriation.

But it remains unfinished.