Excerpts

Exploring the intersection of family history with the rise of the religious right.

A culture clash driven by finances and Old World alignments had the Big Apple contemplating leaving the Union. The Civil War ended that.

The very American story of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance.

Who gets labeled a "narco-terrorist" is all a matter of foreign policy.

A new history examines the long history of a radical and sometimes conservative concept.

The Alabama sheriff who is remembered as a saint—by everyone who isn’t black.

The Early Republic’s maritime jurisprudence is even more relevant given the immense power of the modern executive.

From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is trying to create a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity.

Trump has reinvented Reagan’s old attack, with one key twist.

The standard story of 1960s art is one of Abstract Expressionism leading into Pop Art and minimalism. The Whitney offers a different one centered on surrealism.

Po'pay, a Tewa religious leader, led the Pueblo Revolt, the most successful Indigenous rebellion in what’s now the United States.

Before Donald Trump's takeover proposal for Gaza, another New York real estate magnate had his own plans for the region.

Enigmatic, bigoted, prominent figure of the Confederacy—and one of the highest-ranking Jew in the history of American government. What do we do with him now?

Anti-Chinese hate took vicious and violent forms. Religion was at the heart of it.

“It is not a proper function of the Department of Defense to make allowances for amounts needed to help stimulate the economy.”

What we learn by tracing rebellions from Africa to the Americas.

Each age’s premier industrialist has had appalling politics.

What does history tell us about presidents who have tried to push the limits of the system?

Death in the magnetic age.

New evidence helps resolve enduring mysteries about a 1758 incident that nearly cost the future president his life—and shaped his views on the battles to come.

As the war over American social studies classrooms heats up, the curriculum is in the crosshairs.

Trump has upended a long tradition of claiming, however hypocritically, that foreign intervention is not about power or profit.

How Americans came to see health as a personal responsibility.

Washington believed that civility toward other nations was a strategy to preserve independence, not a concession.

A visual archive of Jan. 6, 2021, through the lenses of those who were there.

An underdressed reporter journeys across icy, barren Greenland—and into Trump’s bored, nineteenth-century brain.

The silver raised in Havana helped finance the Yorktown campaign, revealing the imperial foundations of American independence.

North Carolina regional planning in Richard Saul Wurman’s "The Piedmont Crescent" (1968).

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

A new book recovers stories of Black Georgians who escaped to maroon communities and Spanish Florida.

James Baldwin's fierce attachments.

About 1.5 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic in Liverpool ships, but the city's slave trade was barely acknowledged until recently.

The Trump administration’s erasure of Indigenous history serves a larger project—yet another plunder of land.

When I look at Mamdani, I don’t see some radical departure. I see him as an heir to the Yiddish socialism that helped build New York.

The colonial Dutch tradition of making social calls on New Year's Day in New York was no match for 19th-century-style partying.

Analyzing every mention of 'democracy' in the Congressional Record.

The story of Audley Moore, “one of the most important activists and theorists of the twentieth century.”

His invasion of Venezuela and abduction of Nicolás Maduro recall U.S. imperialism of the early twentieth century—and may similarly lead to global catastrophe.

Ken Burns’s new documentary unpacks the Revolutionary War—and explains why history doesn’t repeat, even if human nature never changes.

The story of the "battle of the bulge."

The unintended consequences of the 20th amendment.

Declassified records begin to detail the U.S. negotiating strategy in the historic accord.

The First Lady of Black country is from Houston, but her name isn’t Beyoncé. It’s Esther Phillips.

Caroline Winterer tells Peter about a debate over practicality and purpose in higher education after the Civil War, and how the humanities offered a solution.

For years, the U.S. Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee reviewed ideas for commemorative coins marking America’s 250th anniversary.

The physicist fought for the promise of a diverse, meritocratic America. We need his optimism today.

By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.

Donald Trump is once again threatening war with Iran just six months after bombing the Islamic Republic in June.

On violence and disorder in the early years of UVA, and the threat it posed to Thomas Jefferson’s vision for American higher education.

On the racist errors that caused a significantly Black parish in Colorado to lose a hallmark of African-American liturgy.