Excerpts

On the legal background to the federal minimum wage, established by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

The chief justice has been working to neuter the Voting Rights Act since the beginning of his career.

From Saint-Simon to Silicon Valley, the urge to forecast the future has always masked a struggle over who gets to define it.

Precious murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and others are even more endangered than we knew.

The Republican Party’s descent into chaos is a product of capitalist fragmentation.

Defeating the Nazi war machine necessitated not just military might, but also skillful diplomacy.

A new book examines Americans' long obsession with the enticing and oppressive concept of entrepreneurship.

Though his writings grappled with the contradiction between bondage and liberty, Thomas Jefferson’s life was indebted to those he enslaved.

How a century of undervaluing women’s labor echoes in policy today.

Black women’s radicalism has been fascism’s enemy for 200 years.

Capitalism is a global economic system, so a proper chronicle of its rise to dominance has to examine the entire world.

A conversation on the wave of landlord perpetrated arson in the Bronx during the 1970s.

The century-long debate over whether parental divorce harms or helps children.

The framers of the United States Constitution envisoned economic discipline that they thought was a requirement for a republic to endure.

History has overlooked the real architect of Joe McCarthy’s purges: his wife.

How mobile and working women managed menstruation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The original doll was not made by Mattel but by a business that perfected its practice making plaster casts of Hitler.

You're misreading Lee Atwater’s infamous “southern strategy” quote as a confession.

What U.S. policymakers should know about U.S.-Africa relations.

Americans have looked to the Declaration of Independence when they sought to remedy contemporary problems and create new visions for the country’s future.

Why 1776 became the year Americans declared themselves an independent nation.

The dangers of confusing self-improvement with institutional change.

When movie fandom became a medical condition.

The documents show how CIA spymaster James Angleton hid Oswald’s movements, hid a secret Israeli liaison, and lied to Congress for decades.

Efforts to surveil and undermine activists went far beyond infamous operations such as Cointelpro.

How Condor launched a wave of cross-border assassinations and disappearances in Latin America.

Left-wing intellectuals' early responses to the 9/11 terror attacks.

A discussion with Father Stephen M. Koeth about religion and suburbanization.

The shah of Iran faced a secular opposition that wanted to restore constitutional government.

What we have long accepted about one of the most galvanizing war photographs of all time may not be true. Can history be rewritten?

The 1894 election cycle holds some key lessons for partisan gerrymanders today.

From Nixon to Trump.

The series dramatizes the brief tenure of the 20th president, who was fatally shot by Charles Guiteau, a lawyer who believed he’d secured Garfield’s election.

The new Netflix miniseries makes the 1881 killing of President James Garfield feel thrillingly current.

But not because the founders wanted to see more guns in the hands of Americans.

Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the John Updike’s remarkable correspondence.

Ken Burns has set himself the impossible task of retelling a national origin story that all Americans will embrace as their own.

A century ago, artists who survived the trenches captured humanity’s capacity for destruction. What can they teach us in a new age of genocide?

What Ken Burns gets wrong about the war that made America.

Doctor, writer, musician, and orator: Rudolph Fisher was a scientist and an artist whose métier was Harlem.

The Mars craze is a case study in twisting evidence and defying facts.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leaves out his father's role in pushing false flag plans for a war with Cuba.

A look at the long history of censorship in public school yearbooks.

For years, one man complicated the official story of who murdered the civil-rights leader. Just before he died in October, he offered a jaw-dropping revelation.

The private-equity billionaire spent decades building influence in the capital. Then his philanthropy collided with the president.

How a historian identified a Lakota child from a single photograph.

A window into the ways that religious people have participated in and shaped the alternative food movement.

On the intersection of spiritualism with 19th century social reform movements.

How soldiers returning from World War I brought the Spanish flu back with them.

How German immigrants brought Christmas celebrations to the United States.