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public history

9 posts in ‘public history’

public history

Imprisoned by War

Racialized and violent, modern U.S. warmaking is inextricably linked with our history of mass incarceration.

Jason A. Higgins

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public history

The Suburban Drug War

How white, middle-class youth in the suburbs experienced the war on drugs is a largely untold chapter in the arc of mass incarceration.

Matthew D. Lassiter

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public history

The Promise of Marronage

Stories of Black flight from enslavement continue to offer lessons for radically rethinking public safety beyond policing.

Celeste Winston

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public history

The Long Revolt

Attica represents far more than a historic rebellion about prison reform. Its revolutionary abolitionist vision endures today.

Orisanmi Burton

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public history

Urban Warfare and Corporate-Funded Armies

Atlanta’s Cop City is another chapter in the long history of U.S.-based colonialism. The second installment in a two-part series.

Joy James & Kalonji Jama Changa

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excerpt

The Embodied Observers

Carceral settings imprison an untold number of experts—outsiders on the inside who have much to teach us about mass incarceration.

Michelle Daniel Jones

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public history

The Buried Roots of Carceral Labor

The U.S. history of coerced prison work is older—and more northern—than its popular origin story tends to acknowledge.

Rebecca McLennan

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public history

The House of D

In the history of a shuttered lockup for queer women in New York City, a reminder that incarceration has always been a form of social control.

Hugh Ryan

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excerpt

A Point of No Return

Understanding the past of the Cook County Jail is understanding its present.

Melanie Newport

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