Excerpts

The Fourteenth Amendment captures the idea that no people born in the United States should be forced to live in the shadows.

The system is rigged, and it’s the Constitution that’s doing the rigging.

On the gendered dimensions of trans-Mississippi Civil War memory, the idea of the single-family household, and the politics of expansion and settlement.

A lifetime spent studying the disastrous lead-up to World War I gave Paul Schroeder reason to be horrified at the recklessness of US foreign policy.

C. Wright Mills, Karl Polanyi, and the Frankfurt School in postwar America.

The qualities that enabled Belle da Costa Greene to cross the color line also made her a formidable negotiator and collector for J.P. Morgan’s library.

Having inherited his mother’s beliefs, Reagan was ever faithful to the Disciples of Christ, whose tenets were often at odds with those of the GOP.

On the early history of Black participation in America's pastime.

From Jim Crow-era performance to contemporary gospel musicals, entertainers have shaped the Black public sphere.

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”

Ararat, a settlement dreamed up in the 1800s, was meant to offer a refuge to Jews. But after an ornate ceremony, plans never got off the ground.

The United States fares badly on the World Happiness Report. Who cares?

After its purchase by a tech entrepreneur, the publication is now a shadow of itself.

"We should go back into history and ask: Why did we need the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906?"

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

Chicago’s latest museum looks to change the narrative around the federally supported housing projects that US cities turned their backs on decades ago.

Marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities can be seen as both celebratory emblems and complicated arbiters of Black American culture.

Food for Peace exemplifies the value of internationalism and humanitarian endeavors in American foreign policy.

Trump is not alone in his support for tariffs. Henry Carey also believed tariffs could help American workers.

What the history of the pocket calculator reveals about the future of AI in classrooms.

On the constitutional settlement that governed America from the end of the Volcker Shock in 1982 to the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024.

I, a historian of the Vietnam War, have watched the Turning Point treatment. I have some notes.

Confused about the oft-mentioned Alien Enemies Act? This explainer, with links to free peer-reviewed scholarship, may help clear things up.

A public opinion poll suggests that people really have strong opinions about a period that they don't really know anything about.

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.

Fifty years after the Vietnam War’s end, lessons from the peace movement on mobilizing resistance.

When Donald Trump and his followers go in search of historical forerunners to justify their regime, they turn with striking regularity to the presidency.

Popular memory of the war in both the U.S. and Vietnam tends to cast the fall of Saigon as inevitable.

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media.

A former garment worker reflects on rank-and-file agitation in the US garment industry just before the industry fled the country.

Rather than resisting authoritarianism, the courts have enabled Trump’s rise.

Removal orders targeting student activists echo America’s long past of jailing and expelling immigrants because of their race, or what they say or believe.

At Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texans flex their go-it-alone style.

The American Revolution’s first battle is a reminder that liberty isn't the result of inevitable progress but a prize won by those willing to fight for it.

The Founders had disagreements about the role of religion in America’s public schools, but there was always one line they would not cross.

The US invasion of Vietnam was catastrophic for the Vietnamese people, resulting in millions of deaths. Fifty years ago, the US-backed regime finally collapsed.

The classroom staple turns a hundred.

The making of Vermont's landscape.

The history of the three-drug combo used in death-penalty executions. 

Queen Marie-Louise outlived most of her family, yet her story about the revolution and its aftermath was rarely consulted by those writing the era’s history.

While some Jewish exiles dreamed of a homeland in Palestine, the Jewish Territorial Organization fixed its hopes on Galveston.

Greg Grandin’s new book tells the story of US expansionism and its complex relationship with the rest of the New World.

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is questioning what a socialist might accomplish as mayor of NYC. To answer it, it’s worth looking back on Fiorello La Guardia.

In 1902, a woman named Mary MacLane from Butte, Montana, became an international sensation after publishing a scandalous journal at the age of 19.

An American story.

The “war on terror” led to a sweeping curtailment of immigrants’ rights that swept up green card holders as well as citizens.

On the case that provoked the courts to decide if the federal government had jurisdiction to exercise American criminal law over Native peoples on Native lands.

Where the rediscovery of Sam Francis goes wrong.

On the movement that fought for old-age pensions during the Great Depression.

How the dystopian visions of the nativist right are in keeping with a long tradition of neoliberal ideology.