Excerpts

Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the author’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.

As high school students embraced political activism, adults turned to the authorities to shield their sons and daughters from radical influences.

In colonial America, government “thanksgivings” blurred faith and politics. For Quakers, rejecting them was an act of religious conviction.

The Marquis de Lafayette’s final visit to the United States in 1825 can show us how to commemorate the Revolution.

The holiday’s real roots lie in abolition, liberation, and anti-racism. Let’s reconnect to that legacy.

The mindset Franklin demonstrated in his scientific work helps us understand his political accomplishments.

A new book offers bitter commentary on the onset of the age of American empire.

Movement conservatism’s excommunications have always centered on one set of issues.

On a late nineteenth century debate: was America exceptional, or were Americans exceptional because they descended from England?

The origin stories of Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Farrar, Sraus and Giroux.

A history of Catholic immigration and activity in colonial North America.

One grieving widower turned his trauma into inspiration for one of the country’s greatest outdoor ideas.

A classic book on UFO believers and their “cognitive dissonance” after aliens failed to land is called into question.

Who was George Eyser, the one-legged German-American gymnast who astounded at the Olympic Games?

In search of the Underground Railroad’s legendary conductor.

David Bohm and Hugh Everett were once ostracized for challenging the dominant thinking in physics. Now, science accepts their ideas.

The settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not escaping religious persecution. They left on the Mayflower to establish a theocracy in the Americas.

Discussing the little-known lineage of leftists who helped shape modern ideas of free trade.

Bonnie Erickson got her start making puppets in Jim Henson's studio, then she became one of America's most beloved mascot designers. Here's how it happened.

In the decades since the Wages for Housework movement, care work has become a site of profit in ways its leaders could never have predicted.

That time Stalin coined the term “American Exceptionalism.”

Charlotte Biltekoff talks about the rise of calories at the turn of the 20th century and the push to get scientific nutritional ideas into American mainstream.

The congressional anti-communist hearings of the 1940s are a reminder that freedom of speech today is even more fragile than it may seem.

Unpacking empires and diaspora in Mexico and the United States.

How a shady car battery additive called AD-X2 sparked a showdown between the U.S. country’s political and scientific establishments.

In some ways, Thanksgiving is a tradition that unites Americans. But the classic image of the Pilgrims obscures important parts of the country’s story.

Adam Shprintzen discusses the 19th-century Americans who saw a vegetarian diet as a powerful tool of moral reform, one that could even put an end to slavery.

On the diet created by Sylvester Graham, designed to ward off a new kind of “health” threat in the liberal 1830s – a masturbation epidemic.

The hosts discuss the transformation of milk from a dangerous, marginalized 19th Century dairy product, to a 20th Century superfood.

What it would mean to take taste seriously again.

Passing your eyes over those first, electric sentences, it occurs to you that his readers are still catching up.

For a fight at Thanksgiving, bring that one up.

Putting religious rights of foster parents above civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. youth, a new executive order reënacts the original sin of the child-welfare system.

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.