Bunk

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From Bolívar to Bad Bunny, there is a long American history of emancipatory visions that transcend national borders. ⬇️ 🗃️

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We extend our gratitude and congratulations to all the authors represented here, and also to the authors of all the other terrific historical writing that we featured on our website in 2025. Please help us expand the audience for their important work by telling your friends about Bunk!

The Roots of Bukele’s Gulag Understanding why Trump is using El Salvador to test the limits of illegal deportation requires returning to the US’s long history of outsourcing violence.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/th...
h/t @jwashing.bsky.social

The New Politics Of Territorial Expansion “Never again” and the “responsibility to protect” now license forcible territorial annexation.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/th...
h/t @nilsgilman.bsky.social @dirkmoses.bsky.social

Listening Devices The veterans of Kagnew Station saw the early growth of the surveillance state. Has the passage of time given them a new understanding of their work?

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/li...
h/t @annneumann.bsky.social

Blessed Is the Spot In a militarized territory like Guam, everything is political, even cancer.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/bl...

Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores?

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/gr...
h/t @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social

Mule Power Unpacking empires and diaspora in Mexico and the United States.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/mu...

American history does not end at the water's edge, of course. The nation's role in the world beyond its borders is the subject of this final set of illuminating historical reconsiderations:

Fair point! Though our project's mandate is "American history," hence the chronological skew.

Donald Trump’s Long Con Trump’s “Art of” trilogy may be full of willful exaggeration, but the books also reveal how the 1980s and 90s formed his dog-eat-dog worldview.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/do...
h/t @lioneltrolling.bsky.social

The Politics of Humiliation The liberal jeremiad warns that democracy is fragile, institutions must be defended, and that vigilance is the price of liberty.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/th...

R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise It used to be progressives who distrusted the experts. What happened?

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/rf...

How Did Republican Fashion Go From Blazers to Belligerence? Trump and his cronies’ style reflects a platform where grievance is currency and performance is power.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/ho...
h/t @dieworkwear.bsky.social

Alien Enemies The torturers have been revising, the gestapos have been busy, and the prisons have been full for generations.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/al...
h/t @brandonshimoda.bsky.social

Switching gears... how do we understand this thing called Trumpism? These five writers took the long view to help us tease out the continuities from the discontinuities, and to try and make sense of the figures at the center of it all.

What I Inherited from My Criminal Great-Grandparents In working through the Winter case files, I often felt pinpricks of déjà vu: an exact turn of phrase, an absurdly specific expenditure.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/wh...

From Eufaula to Eufaula A complex history weaves along the Trail of Tears to connect Eufaula, Alabama, with its namesake in Oklahoma.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/fr...

The 176-Year Argument How the City College of New York went from an experiment in public education to an intellectual hot spot for working class and immigrant students.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/th...

They Were All Our Ancestors Nationalism chooses sides in the most awful family drama of all time. It sides with the evildoers, and never with their victims, and teaches you to do the same.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/th...
h/t @jkuznicki.bsky.social

We Have Talked Enough About Ourselves How the marriage of American exceptionalism and liberal Zionism led to genocide.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/we...
h/t @benjaminmoser.bsky.social

The ways in which we understand the world around us are shaped by the stories that have circulated within our own families. This year, we were moved by the way that these five pieces reconsidered some of those family stories:

The Ritual of Civic Apology Cities across the American West are issuing belated apologies for 19th-century expulsions of Chinese residents, but their meaning and audience remain uncertain.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/th...
h/t @bethlewwilliams.bsky.social

Who Shall and Shall Not Have a Place in the World? Can the racialist and eugenicist roots of statistics be cordoned off from “proper” science?

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/wh...

Uncanny Testimony As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/un...

The Heritage of Dylann Roof Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/th...

The Eloquent Vindicator in the Electric Room No one remembers the assassination of Congressman James M. Hinds. What do we risk by making it just another part of American history?

www.bunkhistory.org/resources/th...

Some of our favorite history writing asks us to reconsider the ways in which we tend to think about the past. Here are a handful of essays in that vein that we found to be especially powerful: