Excerpts

“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.

Slavery in Latin America, on a huge scale, was different from that in the United States. Why don’t we know this history?

Pretty much anything was better than injecting acid into hair follicles.

Histories of the epidemic tend to focus on coastal cities, but the response was very different in the middle of the country.

Marty Reisman, a brilliant, hustling ping-pong showman, rose from NYC clubs to global fame, clashed with officials, defied the sponge era, and left a legend.

In 1990, one of the great forgotten acts of American subterfuge unfolded. It involved Pizza Hut.

The Thanksgiving meal we consider traditional would have likely disgusted the Pilgrims. What would early Americans have eaten?

On the rise of the modern box store as a rebellion against the carefully controlled world of the department store.

Rambunctious and often offensive, R. Crumb draws freely on pre-existing racial and gender stereotypes.

What does it mean to be a liberal in America—and why has that label inspired both devotion and disdain?

Neoliberals long preached that markets and technology reinforce each other. In reality, when one develops, the other tends to stagnate.

William James’s ‘moral equivalent of war’ a hundred years later.

The survival of slave trading during the Civil War suggests that enslaved people remained valuable commodities in a time of economic upheaval.

In 1975, Australia’s PM Whitlam was dismissed by Governor-General Kerr in a US-influenced, Cold War–era soft coup.

How an Irish immigrant’s 1838 ballot in Illinois sparked a court battle over voting rights for non-citizens.

Google grew from a Stanford project into a $3T tech giant, pioneering search, data scaling, and AI, now challenged by regulation and chatbots.

On the enduring influence of one of the genre's most iconic drum riffs.

A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson.

What we lose when casual nudity disappears.

How the history of the anti-mask and anti-vaccination movements hang together.

In the 1970s, the National Science Foundation tried to shake up the Cold War research model.

By 1943, the Girl Scouts had a presence in every Japanese American internment camp.

What happened after West Texas State College desegregated its football team in the 1960s.

What makes a house feel haunted and why do people keep telling these stories?

Restoring stability to American politics will require reviving an age-old concept: common ground.

The story of author L. Frank Baum’s very successful career creating other fantasy lands—department store windows.

The early-20th-century socialist and New York mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit saw liberalism and democracy as a foundation for a transition to socialism.

A writer looks back at the book that shaped her understanding of girlhood, body, and shame.

The fantastical roots of “scientific racism.”

What led Peter Matthiessen from spying to starting a magazine?