Excerpts

Joyce Johnson on the friendship between two famous outsiders.

Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Cowley, and the difficult birth of "On the Road."

The murals at Croatian Catholic Church of St. Nicholas in Millvale do indeed have an implicit politics that was intimately familiar to the congregation.

In correspondence with an abolitionist in London, the great American orator didn’t hold back when talking about Abraham Lincoln, or the maligned Andrew Johnson.

A new book reveals systematic, profitable, and deadly arson schemes perpetrated by landlords and insurance companies in the Bronx.

A personal exploration through Indigenous history and the importance of names.

The Thrilla in Manila nearly killed Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

On Pascal Covici, the editor who nurtured some of the most iconic names in literature.

How the vineyards of Bordeaux led to the wall of separation between church and state.

To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism we must look in unconventional places.

My investigation spanned continents, centuries, and the bounds of good taste.

No one remembers the assassination of Congressman James M. Hinds. What do we risk by making it just another part of American history?

Long before it was fashionable, Amelia Bloomer pioneered what would later be dubbed "respectability politics."

The FBI reads James Baldwin.

What could be more purgative, more exhilaratingly American to the MAGA base than avenging the nation with racial warfare?

Meet Clio, a pedagogical tool that doubles as a travel app to get people hooked on learning history.

Cities across the American West are issuing belated apologies for 19th-century expulsions of Chinese residents, but their meaning and audience remain uncertain.

History suggests that uncivil discourse, while dangerous at times, has always been a defining feature of American democracy.

Today, Silicon Valley is still arguing Stanford's 1989 debate over hate speech.

The Trump administration is ordering the removal of information on slavery at multiple national parks in an effort to scrub them of “corrosive ideology.”

On new biographies of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger.

Thomas Paine nearly died quarantined off in Philadelphia in 1774. Then a Loyalist doctor nursed him back to health.

In a new memoir, Susan Cheever searches for the wellspring of her father’s genius.

Historian Jane Smith understands her childhood differently after discovering that her father had been pushed out of his profession during the Red Scare.

The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

The Bullock Museum glorifies Texas heroes while treating slavery like an awkward uncle no one wants to talk about.

A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution.

A cautionary tale from the Veterans Health Administration’s troubled past.

Two different accounts from former Democratic Party insiders about the “giant U-turn” from postwar prosperity to the polarization and inequality of today.

Trump and his cronies’ style reflects a platform where grievance is currency and performance is power.

On the groundbreaking work of the Japanese photographer who made Washington state his home.

A new biography examines how 19th-century Americans remembered Mary Ball Washington, who raised the future president on her own after her husband’s death.

Neil Postman's classic "Amusing Ourselves to Death" predicted a dystopian American future.

We must see the world as actors of the past did: through a foggy windshield, not a rearview mirror, facing a future of radical uncertainty.

How the first Women's Studies department was developed at U.C. Berkeley in the 1970s.

What looks like Trump-era economic nationalism has deep roots. German nationalists of the 1800s and fascist leaders of the 1930s imagined power through autarky.

The story of the tempestuous collaboration of Ray Bradbury and John Huston on the production of the 1956 movie “Moby Dick.”

Fara Dabhoiwala’s case against free speech.

Firearm ownership meant something very different when the United States was founded.

Black gold powered the United States’ transition from backwater to global hegemon.

"Apple in China" tells the incredible story of China’s industrial development through the lens of America’s most iconic tech giant.

A Black socialist magazine urges solidarity and action in 1919.

A scorched shoe is a crucial part of Zelda Fitzgerald’s modern mythology. But there’s no proof it existed.

Is he merely a reactionary, or do his films paint a more complicated picture?

Exploring ropemaking, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s wild tale.

Why did the first director of the UN agency think eugenics held the key to a more evolved, harmonious world?

Calls to attenuate the brutality of slavery in museum depictions is absurd when our institutions already downplay one of its most horrific features.

In the early days of flight, airships were hailed as the future of war. Then disaster struck the USS Akron.

The administration is trying to neuter the redistributive and protective arms of the state, while exploiting its bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport.

Lionel Trilling defends humanism amid crisis culture, warning that obsessing over evil can erode the self and our capacity for moral and creative agency.