Excerpts

Survivors of the whale attack drifted at sea for months, succumbing to starvation, dehydration—and even cannibalism.

The AFL-CIO’s role in weakening left-wing labor unions around the world, between the 1940s and 1990s.

The untold story behind the killings of two Americans by the Chilean military after the coup.

In a militarized territory like Guam, everything is political, even cancer.

How disease devastated populations of escaped slaves in contraband camps behind Union lines during and after the Civil War.

Plath felt that marriage and children were the necessary but insufficient condition of her continued creativity.

How a fringe libertarian belief in monetary collapse inspired a 1970s literature of survivalism.

On Albert Barnes’ massive acquisition of Chaim Soutine's artworks in the early 1900s.

The constitutional ideas in Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet.

The complex justice whose Youngstown concurrence continues to influence debates over executive power.

What the rise of the “Waterpark Capital of the World” means for its namesake riverscape.

In the last years of the 19th century, Jews inspired by the fight for Cuban independence joined the fray.

Handheld calculators saw a massive amount of innovation in the 1970s—thanks in no small part to LCD screens and a primitive form of typography.

On the links between the rise of marriage counseling and the scientific embrace of eugenics.

A short history of the long war on drugs in Latin America from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump.

In the early twentieth century, America's literature seemed provincial until Malcolm Cowley championed writers like Kerouac and Faulkner as distinctly American.

Pecans are a truly American nut: They grew on George Washington’s estate, and they flew to space on an Apollo mission.

How “Philippine mahogany” became America’s tropical timber of choice, thanks to a rebrand from a colonial logging company that drove deforestation.

A train wreck that caused the death of more than a dozen commuters was the impetus behind a monumental project that changed the urban landscape.

Fitzgerald sank in a 1975 storm; Lightfoot’s song made it iconic. The wreck came to symbolize the Midwest’s industrial decline.

The liberal jeremiad warns that democracy is fragile, institutions must be defended, and that vigilance is the price of liberty.

An institutional history of the “peculiar institution.”

There has been a long history of nonviolent resistance in the United States, from William Lloyd Garrison to Martin Luther King Jr.

On the culture wars of the late 1980s and ’90s.

Small wars have been used as a foundation of global order. The belief that limited violence preserves peace serves imperial control.

On the making of one of Hollywood's iconic child characters.

Fifty years later, two iconic photographs of Los Angeles from 1975 contain our present moment.

The Parcae project revolutionized electronic eavesdropping.

A new book doesn’t aim to skewer Jewish defenders of slavery or celebrate Jewish abolitionists, but to understand them, warts and all.

“Whether or not Heraclitus was right that you can’t step into the same river twice, you certainly can’t return to the same New York.”

Two scholars discuss activism from the era of the Model Cities Program to the present, and consider the preservation of “illegitimate” histories for future use.

How and why Walter A. McDougall's representation of history differs from the standard narrative, especially regarding the Wilson administration.

Althea Gibson, one of the great tennis players of the twentieth century, made segregation in her sport untenable.

Leaders in Cobb county pushed a huge stadium plan in the late ’50s to lure teams and suburban growth, but funding, leagues, and politics stalled it.

Burns and co-director Sarah Botstein discuss their six-part, 10-year labor of love, which finally makes it to PBS on November 16.

For 150 years, Atlanta has endured racist policing that has served the interest of the city’s economic elite. The fight to resist this goes back just as far.

The parallels between two American nonprofits that control major for-profit corporations.

Key historical records about the incident during the Reagan administration, known as the Able Archer 83 War Scare, were removed without explanation.

We owe it to Americans of all ages to be honest about the country’s past, including its contradictions.

On the first political convention in support of the Anti-Masonic Party, in reaction to the number of political elites involved in the secretive Masonic society.

“Trouble men” searched for water damage in early analog telephones.

Bringing historical perspective to the current moment of nationalism redux and US-Canada border complexity.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, margarine defied the odds—surviving federal regulations, industry smear campaigns, and even a bizarre mandate to dye it pink.

When the WTO gathered in Seattle in 1999, protests erupted. Their strategy offers a model for resisting globalization at a time of renewed urgency.

Abortion has been an inescapable fact of life for millennia. So why do women gain or lose control over their reproductive lives at different times in history?

Unmasking the history of racism in U.S. immigration enforcement.

Charles Oldrieve used custom-made wooden shoes to float on the water’s surface and propel himself forward.

A great-great-grandson pushed to portray Jefferson as an abolitionist, leaving a misleading impression about his actions on equality and slavery.

Photographs that show "a country of people made rich at the expense of the environment, but seeing the richness spoiled by a world they’ve destroyed."

"The Atlantic" was born in an era of information overload.