Another year, another abundance of probing & insightful writing that invites us to think about our world through the lens of the past. It wasn’t easy for us to narrow down, but we've managed to come up with this list of our top 40 favorites.

The American Legion staged a propaganda pageant in WI #OTD in 1950, play-acting their absurd fantasies of communism: denying kids candy! "executing" cops! @Brettarosenberg reflects on the real consequences of political theater performed to instill fear.

Writing @TheProspect, @nkulw traced Powell's many deceptions from My Lai to Desert Storm to WMDs:

In a long career of information management on behalf of the US military, Colin Powell performed his most consequential PR stunt #OTD in 2003: holding up a model of weaponized anthrax and falsely claiming to the UN Security Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. (1/2)

In anticipation of tonight's #GrammyAwards, check out these highlights from the vast collection of #musichistory writing we've gathered at Bunk: .

RT @adamrowe82: My essay for Compact on Trump’s very nineteenth century appetite for territory.

RT @AlexisCoe: Here's what you might not remember about the OG Farewell Address by George Washington: . 1. It wasn't actually a speech! It….

In 1978, Jonathan Lethem discovered Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time Slip. 20 years later, he re-spun it into a new novel. But he still didn't grasp its connection to the lived reality of Palestinians. He explains his journey to understanding @parisreview:.

Remember those whipped-cream delivery vans, mobile libraries, jet-fuel trucks, and ant buses from Richard Scarry’s “Cars and Trucks and Things That Go”? To mark the book's 50th, Chris Ware offered this profile of Scarry @yalereview: .

Timers that countdown the days until girl celebrities are of legal age was the subject of an essay by Katherine Fusco @DilettanteArmy. It compared the response to Shirley Temple's "availability" in the early 40s to the culture around Lindsay Lohan in 2004.

@AustinMcCoy3 @thebafflermag In a great piece @DefectorMedia, Asher Elbein chronicled the evolution of Marvel's Magneto. It’s a tour-de-force through the history of comics, Judaism, & Holocaust memory culture. Despite the character's dark past, the piece lands on a hopeful message.

@AustinMcCoy3 penned a musical autobiography @thebafflermag, ranging from an adolescence where hip-hop offered “a language and style to express my disdain for the trappings of respectability politics” to an academic job teaching history via the art form.

Today we return to the roundup of our favorite short-form history writing from 2024. Next up, a few stories from our Culture section, our home for writing “on folkways and creative industry.”.

RT @devintoshea: up now on HNN, check out the write-up on the KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE — Booth, Bickley, opium, and buried (racist) tre….

1948 was the year the state of Israel, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, & the Genocide Convention were all born. It was also the year S. Africa officially became an apartheid state. Robin D.G. Kelley unspooled the many contradictions @HammerandHope: .

Evan Rothera also looked to other Americas in this @aeonmag piece about what we can gain from a hemispheric perspective on the late-19th Cent. “Historians of Reconstruction have largely written about this period as if the rest of the world did not exist.”.

Writing @thedialmag, @Alexander_Avina interrogated the meaning of “America,” inspired by Langston Hughes. “O, let America be America again, Hughes wrote, “The land that never has been yet—And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”.

Next up: our favorite 2024 stories from Bunk's Beyond section, where we gather stories "on Americans’ connections to the larger world." .

@nplusonemag @erikmbaker At @hedgehogreview, Ashley Barnes reflected on the ideals of 19C Spiritualists and novelists: “to outdo the claims of traditional Christianity by convincing readers that the words put on a page by a living man could prove the durability of the human soul.”

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery?’” So wrote Aaron Bushnell right before he set himself on fire to protest Israel’s war in Gaza. The act prompted a profound piece @nplusonemag by Bunk favorite @erikmbaker: .

Check out the entire list here: Below, we'll highlight some of the stories on it. First up are two great pieces from the “Belief” section of our site.