I can't wait to assign this as part of my Centralia Massacre activity

"During the First Red Scare, public officials from California to Indiana deputized local American Legion posts as armed vigilante forces, ready to purge the perceived threats of labor unrest, Bolshevism, and anarchy, threats sometimes attributed to immigrant communities."

Tonight we're watching Duane Barry/Ascension and reading this: "When Duane begs for honesty, he echoes thousands of people who demand answers from those that pollute their bodies and their land."

“The arguments that justify adjunct labor can be and are turned around on those who thought their positions were secure, a point adjuncts have been making for decades.”

The X-Files is on Pluto now, so why not watch "Darkness Falls" and then read a bit about the history that inspired it?

The X-Files is on Pluto now, so why not watch "Darkness Falls" and then read a bit about the history that inspired it?

"The 1927 expedition to Paris exposed the central contradiction of the early American Legion – an organization that sought to present itself as a benign custodian of memory and shared sacrifice in combat, yet one haunted by its history of vigilantism and exclusionary nationalism."

"The 1927 expedition to Paris exposed the central contradiction of the early American Legion – an organization that sought to present itself as a benign custodian of memory and shared sacrifice in combat, yet one haunted by its history of vigilantism and exclusionary nationalism."

This year, we are adding audio versions of many of your favorite articles, and donors to the magazine get early access through our private podcast feed! Donate today and you’ll get to hear all of our monster series authors over the next few weeks, beginning with Sam Moore.

We pay every contributor, and other than a few one-time donations and a small and surprising grant last fall, the entire magazine is currently sustained by *fewer than 200 monthly donors*. If you're a regular reader, consider becoming a $5/month donor. It helps us feel secure offering contracts.

This year, we are adding audio versions of many of your favorite articles, and donors to the magazine get early access through our private podcast feed! Donate today and you’ll get to hear all of our monster series authors over the next few weeks, beginning with Sam Moore.

"The danger is not in practicing revisionist history—it’s in constructing individual and collective lives around historical frameworks too shaky to be looked at again."

@lawcha.bsky.social and @laborlawchajournal.bsky.social will jointly award a $2,000 grant for research leading to an article to a contingent/adjunct faculty, community college faculty, or independent scholar engaged in work related to working people. @contingent-mag.bsky.social @historians.org

"The danger is not in practicing revisionist history—it’s in constructing individual and collective lives around historical frameworks too shaky to be looked at again."

If you're home today or need something exciting to read at work, make sure you read @theotherrbg.bsky.social's essay about a proposed German-Jewish settler colony in Alaska. Originally a bonus piece for donors, it is now available to all @contingent-mag.bsky.social readers. Read, share, and enjoy!

"The fact that a radically pro-immigrant purveyor of progressive New Deal policies wanted to move a white-passing refugee people into colonized territory to settle it is emblematic of most white Americans’ uncritical acceptance of imperialism." A bonus piece from 2025, now for everyone.

It's a good time to revisit Miss Perkins.

If you liked Abigail Weil's "Public Health" or Josh Carmony's "Ground Operations," I think you will get something out of reading this piece.

If you missed it this week, take some time to read Oline Eaton's piece on the pandemic, precarity, sexual assault, and teaching. Originally meant for a collection that was never published, we've preserved it as written in the fall of 2021: "an anticipatory dread of a history we had not yet lived."

Can an archive make a monster of a historian? But of course! I wrote about this for @contingent-mag.bsky.social, and the essay is now both free to read online and available as an audio read by me! The audio version: 💙📚 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH #maps #cartography 1/2

"The cliché of judging people by the standards of their time, by working to exempt people in the past from the critical eye of the present, simultaneously obscures other historical figures who we might appraise more positively, especially knowing the context in which they were making their choices."

Over the past year, there are times when it's felt like the distinct challenges of precarious academics have been subsumed into the general panic over the destruction of the university in the US--and then forgotten, quite conveniently. But Oline wants us to remember.

This piece deals with being contingent in Spring semester 2021, through the pandemic, the insurrection, and a sexual assault. And it was originally written for a collection about contingent pandemic teaching that couldn't find a publisher. @contingent-mag.bsky.social is happy to publish it.

“Major historical dread meant something to me then, in that context, lifetimes ago, back in 2014 . . . It was an anticipatory dread of a history we had not yet lived.”

“Major historical dread meant something to me then, in that context, lifetimes ago, back in 2014 . . . It was an anticipatory dread of a history we had not yet lived.”

"The 'superfluous foams and tides and noise' that exist(ed) are what I aim to record here. All was not well in Spring 2021. This is one story about how it looked to be teaching then." Part 2 arrives tomorrow morning.

This is a bad time to be publishing a magazine, but then, we started in 2019, so it's never NOT been a bad time to be asking people to slow down and read something. So slow down and read something this evening.

“[F]ull disclosure: as I write this during the first week of January 2021, in the midst of an insurrection a mile away at the US Capitol, my imagination is taxed, so I’m not 100% sure what we’re going to do. But we’ll figure it out.” Our latest, from Oline Eaton. Look for Part 2 on Friday.

“[F]ull disclosure: as I write this during the first week of January 2021, in the midst of an insurrection a mile away at the US Capitol, my imagination is taxed, so I’m not 100% sure what we’re going to do. But we’ll figure it out.” Our latest, from Oline Eaton. Look for Part 2 on Friday.

"I still check his faculty page on the website of the university where he’s now tenure-track, like picking at a scab to see if it still bleeds. And there it always is, taunting me on his list of research interests: 'Couples-level interventions to reduce drug use.'”

Podcast #2 is out! Hear @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social read her December piece “Can the Archive Make a Monster of a Historian?”

"I still check his faculty page on the website of the university where he’s now tenure-track, like picking at a scab to see if it still bleeds. And there it always is, taunting me on his list of research interests: 'Couples-level interventions to reduce drug use.'”

“This all had me wondering: what’s Indian food without the heat? The historian in me has an answer: spiciness is historically contingent.”

Subscribe to our new podcast to hear @gvaughnjoy.bsky.social read her November 2025 piece “To Invent Immortality.”

Subscribe to our new podcast to hear @gvaughnjoy.bsky.social read her November 2025 piece “To Invent Immortality.”

“This all had me wondering: what’s Indian food without the heat? The historian in me has an answer: spiciness is historically contingent.”

"A drought takes a perfect storm—then it causes one: an exact combination of violent climate conditions, causing an equal amount of violent cultural activity that embodies its own grief, rage, zeal, and horror, all at once."

Something new coming your way— audio versions of some of your favorite Contingent pieces read by the authors themselves!

Something new coming your way— audio versions of some of your favorite Contingent pieces read by the authors themselves!

In honor of Nancy Drew's entry into the public domain, here's a piece on how librarians themselves were the ones to keep her off the shelves for many years. This piece was a bonus piece for donors as part of our 2022 History & Mystery series, but now it's for everyone!

In honor of Nancy Drew's entry into the public domain, here's a piece on how librarians themselves were the ones to keep her off the shelves for many years. This piece was a bonus piece for donors as part of our 2022 History & Mystery series, but now it's for everyone!

If you're looking for pieces for an undergrad classroom that help show how historians do their work, we've got you covered. For instance, there's David McKenzie's exploration of a shady dentist-cum-gold miner.

"This place in the past is still here in the present. It’s the only way anything can be of the past; if it weren’t in the present, we wouldn’t know about it. I told my father so, in hospice, when he worried that by dying he was abandoning us."

If you're looking for pieces for an undergrad classroom that help show how historians do their work, we've got you covered. For instance, there's David McKenzie's exploration of a shady dentist-cum-gold miner.

"This place in the past is still here in the present. It’s the only way anything can be of the past; if it weren’t in the present, we wouldn’t know about it. I told my father so, in hospice, when he worried that by dying he was abandoning us."

I use Contingent pieces in my classes. They’re great! @richterscale.bsky.social’s The Trouble with Triscuits makes an excellent first conversation for my senior research seminar. ❤️ 🗃️

If you're working on new preps for the upcoming semester, consider assigning Contingent! In addition to our mailbag and How I Do History series, we've sorted our pieces by theme to make it easier to find something that fits. contingentmagazine.org/for-educators/

"...the monstrous drunkard was irredeemable in the eyes of Protestant clergymen, educated medical professionals, and later, temperance reformers, until modern efforts to medicalize alcoholism."