Rebecca Onion

Biography

Rebecca Onion is a staff writer at Slate and the author of Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States (North Carolina, 2016). Onion holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin and is a visiting scholar in the department of history at Ohio University.

See Work

PHOTOGRAPHY / Winter 2018

Codes of Exclusion

Photography by Benjamin Rasmussen ,  Essay by Rebecca Onion
LEFT: A brass coin created and distributed in 1940 by Hugh T. Fisher, a former member of the Kansas senate, to stimulate “democratic thinking” in Kansans. RIGHT: Ferguson youth activist Dontey Carter. “This isn’t just a stand for Michael Brown. This is a stand for everybody that needs justice. The officers need to protect and serve, not reject and keep us scared. We need this and that is why as young people this is our civil rights movement. We will take it all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to.”
PHOTOGRAPHY / Summer 2018

Beckon Us From Home

Photography by Sarah Blesener ,  Essay by Rebecca Onion

Enlisting in a Patriotic Education

Photographed by Sarah Blesener.
CRITICISM / Summer 2015

Driving Off Into the Sunset

By Rebecca Onion
CRITICISM

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Outtakes

By Rebecca Onion

My four-year-old nieces love the picture-book versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, which extract small stories from the canon, representing them simply for young readers.
CRITICISM / Fall 2014

On Letters of Note

By Rebecca Onion

Letters of Note, a five-year-old blog run by Shaun Usher, is now a book. The blog offers correspondence “deserving of a wider audience” (as its tagline runs). When possible, Usher’s blog presents the letters in their original scans...