Excerpts

If this nation hopes to achieve a justice system that is just, it must remain ever vigilant for any echo from Attica.

The books of the last two decades show how overreacting to the attacks unmade America’s values.

Transnational networks have long helped pregnant people navigate treatment options.

The US suffered grave losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t mistake revisions of US military strategy for a turn away from imperialist ambitions.

The Magnum photographer looks back on capturing an “inconceivable event.”

Today, drowning rates are disproportionately high among Black children. What’s being done?

How the turn toward “precision” combat promoted endless war.

Confronting the violence of U.S. policing requires an international perspective.

"My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.”

As Progressive Era reforms increased the power of government, organized opposition to vaccination campaigns took on a new life.

A review of “West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire."

In the gold-rush era, ceremonial greetings swiftly gave way to bigotry and violence.

At first, it was all about hauling things we needed. Then the vehicle itself became the thing we wanted.

A top White House aide recounts her experiences that day.

In the wake of 9/11, some called for rounding up whole groups of people but Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta knew the U.S. had done that before.

On Pete Souza’s Obama.

Conspiracy theories like QAnon are ultimately a social problem rather than a cognitive one. We should blame politics, not the faulty reasoning of individuals.

What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?

First responders who survived 9/11 don’t want the day to be forgotten.

How antebellum women prevented themselves from getting pregnant during an era when their identity was founded on being a mother.

A brief history of self-induced abortion.

From the colonial period to the end of the US Civil War, the rattlesnake sssssssymbolized everything from evil to unity and power.

At the intersection of gender and racial discrimination, Black widows struggled to get the compensation they deserved.

The career and legacy of a Black critic who argued for the elevation of Black performance.

On the nostalgic and technophobic motives of the recent boom in suburban fantastic media.

The forgotten history of Soviet-American vaccine diplomacy.

In the nineteenth century, laws in many parts of the country prohibited "undeserving" disabled people from appearing in public.

America’s ambivalence about labor is nothing new. In the colonial era the ruling class had nothing but contempt for anything that could be justly called "work."

A new documentary goes inside the battles that have riven the institution and shaped the historical legacy of the attack.

Seventy years after the UN Refugee Convention, the United States should refresh its commitment to displaced people.

My questions about my grandmother's death – from a self-induced abortion – haven’t changed since I was 12. What feels new is the urgency of her story.

Far from ushering in a zero-waste world, the switch from returnables to recycling provided cover for the creation of ever more packaging trash.

MTV's 1981 broadcast was advertised to be as important as the moon landing.

Players, fans and authors recall the landmark 1971 starting nine.

A review of "Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America."

For women who play sports, there's often no way to win.

Celebrations of multiculturalism obscure the country’s settler colonial history—and the role that immigrants play in perpetuating it.

The discovery of oil and gas made members of the Osage Nation among the richest people in the world. But it also made them targets for exploitation.

But the evidence never backed it up before, and it doesn’t support such claims today either.

The U.S. can’t win wars for countries.

DNA testing kits have shifted the way both researchers and the public think about race and identity. This shift is evident in the 2020 U.S. Census data.

It’s a story of U.S. misdeeds, but also Native resilience.

We have no historical precedent for this moment.

Half a world away, the citizens of two nations suffer at the hands of a familiar malefactor.

Consolidation aimed to bring cutting-edge reforms to rural schools. Instead, it hurt kids and communities.

An account of the long-lasting effects of nuclear energy in the US.

During WWI the act of hearing was recast as a tactical activity — one that could determine human and even national survival.

Its legacy lives on today in the struggles faced by modern miners seeking workers' rights.

Or, a lost freedom story I found while looking for something else.

On the roads and seas miners traveled to reach gold in the United States and Australia.