Excerpts

Fifty years ago, Newark, New Jersey, elected its first Black mayor—Kenneth Gibson—at a moment when there was an urgency to address police violence.

In a recent speech, Trump looks to America's past for answers. However, the history he recounts is glaringly limited.

The two decades leading up to WWII featured numerous connections between America and Nazi Germany that reveal Nazism was never simply a foreign or enemy force.

In Oakland, California, when it comes to Black homelessness and dispossession, dystopia is already here.

Shakespeare's Macbeth and the Federal Theatre Project

On the corrupt, contaminated, deceptive world of 19th-century food adulteration, and how Cohen's own work straddles pure academia and public-facing scholarship.

It’s the biggest battle on U.S. soil that most Americans have never heard of.

The study of circuit riding helps to highlight the importance of the lower federal courts in American legal history.

How the self-proclaimed "First Widow" used her celebrity to influence public opinion.

Cailloux’s valor, and the Black troops he led in battle, electrified northern opinion and gave federal race policy a strong jolt.

World War I was a catastrophic, barbaric conflict that left tens of millions of people dead and set the stage for anti-democratic rollbacks for years to come.

Power, plague and Christianity were closely intertwined in 17th-century New England.

Returning the "three sisters" to Native American farms nourishes people, land, and cultures.

A dispatch from Wounded Knee that layers the realities of poverty, climate change, and resilience on the history of colonization, settlement, and genocide.

A revised history of the interstate highway system.

Pass the free enterprise, please.

A number of recent books blame the rise of neoliberalism on economists. But the evidence suggests it is still capital that rules.

Biased ideas about a link between body size and health have led many people to dismiss unexpected scientific findings.

The irrational, the political, and fear of elections in colonial Pennsylvania.

James Shapiro’s recent book looks at why Shakespeare has been a mainstay of the cultural and political conflicts of the country since its founding.

The story of Caesar, an enslaved chef and chocolatier in colonial Virginia.

Guns have always loomed large in Black people's lives — going all the way back to the days of colonial slavery, explains reporter Alain Stephens from The Trace.

History offers some pointers for government regulators.

In The Loud Minority, Daniel Gillion examines the relationship between electoral politics and protest movements.

He didn’t make a penny.

Today’s “medical freedom” warriors are drawing on a centuries-old American tradition.

A friend of Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sewall Osgood's pursuit of her scientific passion illuminates the limits and possibilities placed on the era's women.

The anatomy of the “orphan train” genre.

For the poor, who are disproportionately people of color, the criminal justice system in the United States is essentially a plea-and-probation system.

Can a system built on racial violence actually deliver justice?

For more than 150 years after it was coined, “terrorism” meant violence inflicted by the state on its people. How did the word come to mean the reverse?

The flamboyant big-cat aficionados of the Gilded Age weren’t strangers to fierce competition, threats and bizarre drama.

Enacting vaccination mandates demands political give and take.

With Susan Ronald’s meticulous, relentless biography, Joseph P. Kennedy is now firmly established in the annals of twentieth-century fascism.

Conservatives can’t turn back the clock. But they can disrupt local meetings.

A history of the People’s Temple before the tragic murder-suicides.

David O. Stewart discusses the relationship between William Costin and the Washington bloodline.

Until school boards and administrators listen to teachers, they’ll end up with shortages in every crisis.

Though the organization’s legacy has been domesticated, its grassroots leadership embraced the global fight for freedom.

W.E.B. Du Bois defined the shift from slavery to freedom as a “general strike” — and there are parallels to today.

Racial covenants made it illegal for Black people to live in white neighborhoods. Now they're illegal, but you may still have one on your home's deed.

The settlers who are mythologized at Thanksgiving as peace-loving Pilgrims were offering cash for Native American heads less than a generation later.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

How racism has shaped the history — and present — of bicycle use.

What’s at stake in debates about the meaning and visibility of the Black Santa.

Over time, the historic roots of some holiday music have been forgotten.

Our country's legal history renders the teen's case familiar if not inevitable.

What we think we know about stifling inflation could be wrong.

The legacy of slavery is often invoked to explain the stunted welfare state. But the strongest resistance to taxation and redistribution came from the Northern ruling class.

The story of John Wolcott Phelps and his push for Lincoln to emancipate all slaves.