Broken Treaties and the Meaning of Sovereignty
How Native treaties shaped U.S. expansion, why so many promises were broken, and how sovereignty and treaty rights remain legally important today.
Read the storyFollow the experiences of Latino, Hispanic, and Chicano communities through changes in borders, culture, citizenship, labor, and rights.
Editorial illustration · not archival photography
How the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo redrew the border and reshaped Mexican American citizenship, land claims, and belonging in the Southwest.
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How Native treaties shaped U.S. expansion, why so many promises were broken, and how sovereignty and treaty rights remain legally important today.
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Learn how U.S. naturalization law tied citizenship to whiteness, how courts defined racial eligibility, and why citizenship became a boundary of belonging.
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Black Americans played a central role in expanding U.S. democracy. Learn how struggle, organizing, and resistance shaped participation.
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Learn how company towns used housing, stores, scrip, isolation, and debt to control workers’ wages, mobility, and daily life, especially in coal and industrial
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Learn how racial categories were created through early American laws and policies, shaping opportunity, identity, and inequality across many communities.
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