Told

Democrats’ years-long efforts to reclaim the word are cresting in this year’s Presidential race.

Just about every major development in the current presidential campaign started as a television event.

Historians question "expansion" as the defining process of U.S. growth, proposing alternative terms like "empire" and "settler colonialism."

Plus: How George Washington almost ruined his own exit from the national stage.

An animation historian on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon charged with electrifying everything in the early 20th century.

How I learned the story of the My Lai Massacre.

National Football League pre- and postgame shows have become a testing ground for novel technology in the waning days of linear television.

Donald Trump supporters run their version of the original dog-whistle attack ad against Kamala Harris. Here’s the history.

It's misleading, invidious, and it obscures what's actually bad and scary about right-wing nationalist foreign policy.

Humans have doodled for as long as they have written and drawn, but psychoanalysis began to imagine the doodle as a key to understanding the unconscious mind.

Samuel Roth was the sort of bookseller whose wares came wrapped in brown paper.

Charting the history of a TV phenomenon.

The American public is more susceptible than ever to skewed narratives.

The latest biography of the great transcendentalist captures the paradoxes of his Yankee mind.

A pre-history of the sentence diagrams that were once commonplace in the American classroom.

"To believe that the richness of Black identity can be understood through a temporary costume trivializes the lifelong trauma of racism. It turns the complexity of Black life into a stunt."

Naked runners used to disrupt events seemingly all the time. Why’d they stop?

For more than two decades, a community of committed internet users has been chewing over the famous Londoner’s diary.

How do fandoms gain their names?

Judith Jones edited culinary greats such as Julia Child and Edna Lewis—and identified the pleasure at the core of traditional “women’s work.”

No, really.

Betty Ford and the public eye.

The end of the big-city columnist.

More importantly, our misappropriation of “puritan” has allowed scholars to ignore and the public to misunderstand religion.

Advertising went from being an embarrassing activity to a legitimate part of every company’s business plans—despite scant evidence that it worked.

Marty Peretz and the travails of American liberalism.

A brief history of the textfile, and the production of conspiracy theories on the internet.

In Indiana, “hoosier” is a badge of honor. In St Louis, it’s the nastiest insult around. The difference reveals the prejudice that breaks worker solidarity.

Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language declared Americans free from the tyranny of British institutions and their vocabularies.

A new PBS documentary whitewashes the conservative founder of National Review.