Excerpts

Museums that harbor unethically obtained human remains are undergoing a reckoning. It’s about time.

While the awards have recognized achievements in rap, Black artists continue to face musical segregation.

Before Americans worried about government or corporate surveillance, 19th-century criminals took advantage of a new technology to steal valuable information.

Woody Holton’s "Liberty is Sweet" charts not only the contest with Great Britain over “home rule” but also the internal struggle over who should rule at home. 

How the team came to have that name and why it still persists.

The NYT identifies the 'religious fervor in the American right' — around four decades late.

Shaina Taub’s new musical follows Alice Paul’s tireless quest to win American women the vote.

The artist’s experiences in the Civil War and after helped him transcend stereotypes in portraying Black experience.

Is the Republican Party compatible with democracy?

You likely think of the American West as deeply conservative and rural. Yet history shows this politics is very new indeed.

A stubborn and surprising immigrant enclave, hiding in plain sight on the Lower East Side.

What obligation does the US have toward people who are uprooted by war?

"The Deportation Express: A History of America through Forced Removal" traces the historical roots and spatial routes of systemic denial, arrest, and removal from the United States.

An overview of historical scholarship and socio-cultural developments in America to explain how racism became institutionalized against Black Americans.

Navigating the line between historical records and mystic imagery to understand the Underground Railroad.

How and why did Johnson consider American military involvement in Vietnam a worthwhile cause that would benefit American interests and American lives?

We don’t need to overanalyze it. It came down to genuine solidarity that the Amazon Labor Union organizing committee built among themselves and their co-workers.

On Martin Luther King's use of radical ideas to create an understanding of the history of America.

The US Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property.

While the world’s fastest-growing religious faith offers material benefits and psychological uplift to many, it also pushes a reactionary political agenda.

The killing of three civil-rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964 changed America.

The actions of one New Jersey royal governor demonstrate a rare case of impartial justice for Native Americans.

A story born in blood.

Automation didn’t start in the age of robots and microchips, but can be traced back to the late 19th century glass industry and its skilled glass workers.

The key witness in Clarence Thomas’s nomination process discusses how sex and race shaped the new Justice’s experience, and her own.

In a new exhibit, Winslow Homer, once seen as the oracle of the nation’s innocence, is recast as a poet of conflict.

In Early America, some prestigious residents advocated for the replacement of cane sugar, supplied by enslaved workers, with maple sugar from family farms.

A new book juxtaposes dominant narratives about motherhood, women’s autonomy, and abortion with the weirdness of ordinary lives.

Diversity, national Identity, and the fraught history behind the State Department’s search for diplomats who “look like America.”

A conversation about "Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World."

For 30 years, the debate has largely ignored the soaring costs of inaction.

My policy was to work for the best, while expanding NATO to prepare for the worst.

A brief history of how the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) led organized protests against racially-discriminatory housing in Los Angeles.

Forced to bear her enslaver's children, Mary Lumpkin later forged her own path to freedom.

A new book argues that the conflict was a battle for empire.

Why dam removal is critical for restoring the Charles River.

What are elevator passengers listening to?

John Gunther’s “Death Be Not Proud” defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.

Why the American war was destined for catastrophe and tragedy from the start.

How a massacre on March 22, 1622 irrevocably shaped relations between Indigenous Americans and English colonists.

The Black feminist collective's 1977 statement has been a bedrock document for academics, organizers and theorists for 45 years.

Uncovering the fallacy of his iconic image as a man ruled by solely by reason and logic.

MLB owners’ recent lockout was an effort to reverse the gains that players had won over decades of labor struggle. The owners failed.

Pauline Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Fight for The Colored American Magazine.

For nearly all of its modern existence, the Great Dismal Swamp has been excluded from U.S. history. Now there’s a push to bring its significance to light.

A new book by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran examines how 18th-century academics understood Black identity.

In 1929, Ethel Barrymore went on the ‘18-Day Diet.’ From there, it took the country by storm. Until, that is, its disciples began dying.

Unveiling the 1950 Census reveals the value of these types of records.

The system's roots aren't in rescuing children, but in the policing of Black, Indigenous, and poor families.

The lesson of the first Gulf War and its aftermath for handling Russia.