Excerpts

What connection does the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have to the party of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?

A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people.

Smokeable pot's proliferation in North America involves the Mexican Revolution, the transatlantic slave trade, and Prohibition.

The author discusses Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight, racism in magazines, and why she’s so hopeful for the future of music and writing.

A conversation with historian Gary Gerstle about understanding neoliberalism as a bipartisan worldview and how the political order it ushered in has crumbled. 

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

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

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

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

Josh Hawley’s attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are part of a long, sad tradition.

Historian Daryl Scott weighs in on the 1619 Project and the "possibility that we rend ourselves on the question of race."

Historian Robin Einhorn reflects on Americans’ complicated relationship to taxes, from the colonial period through the Civil War to the tax revolts of the 1980s.

Prisons have been controversial since their beginnings in the late 1700s — why do they keep failing to live up to expectations?

Revisiting post-war activist movements around the world to understand generational conflicts in the left.

A new book tells the stories of four interwar writers who laid the groundwork for modern journalism.

Bay’s new book explores the intertwined history of travel segregation and African American struggles for freedom of movement.

Barbara Smith, a key contributor to contemporary Black feminist thought, formed the Combahee River Collective to address Black women's interlocking oppressions.

The radicalization of a congressional clerk in the 1800s and the introduction of the telegraph set a young country on a new trajectory.

A conversation with Louisa Hall about her novel, “Trinity.”

We often associate dance with art and performance, but it is also a way that humans document, interpret, and create history.

The scholar has changed the way Black authors get read and the way Black history gets told.

Nancy Sinkoff discusses her new biography of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, a Holocaust historian whose role in the neoconservative movement is often forgotten.

Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. discusses his new memoir.

How can historic data about segregation, redlining, and real estate be more accessible? In this interview, we dive into a new data set derived from HOLC maps.

Amid all the suffering and death, friends and supporters arose in unexpected—often religious—places.

A historian of global health explains how the lack of ICU beds in low-income communities is the result of government spending cuts dating back to the 1970s.

A new book argues that mail service played a critical role in the U.S. government’s westward expansion and occupation of Native lands.

From the Black Panthers to the Communist Party, radical Los Angeles in the ’60s was a seething cauldron of unrest, united by the brutal repression of the LAPD.

A leading historian of Madison's political thought explains that the framer "did not believe in minority rule."

"The problem is the way policing was built," historian Khalil Muhammad says.

Suburbs are getting more diverse, but that doesn't mean they’re woke.

He forced the country to engage in a three-year conversation about the meaning of free speech that shaped policy and law after World War I.

An Illinois high school teacher explains how his state complicates the binary of “free states” and “slave states.”

“What if we identified the politics of municipal debt as circumscribing political horizons and futures?”

"If you read enough sources, you run into cases of slaves spending a lot of time over Christmas crying."

In the 1930s, Socialist and Communist organizers tried to help Black sharecroppers rise up against their oppressors.

A conversation with the biographer of radical Jewish 'revenge theologian' Meir Kahane.

Historian Richard White on the greed, ineptitude and economic cost behind the transcontinental railroads, and the implications for infrastructure policy today.

The historian Allen C. Guelzo believes that the Confederate general deserves a more compassionate reading.

An interview with Sean Wilentz on Library of America's new collection of Richard Hofstadter's works.

Led by A. Philip Randolph, Black Pullman porters secured dignity on the job — and laid the foundation for the modern Civil Rights Movement.

The debate between historians and economists over the definition of capitalism, and the legacy of slavery in the structure of today's economy.

Fidel Castro's visit to Harlem at the intersection of two themes that shaped the 1960s: the Black freedom struggle and global protest during the Cold War.

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

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.

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

It’s never just about religion, says the author of a book about celebrities discovering new religious identities.

Lawrence Matsuda talks about his family history, his experiences of discrimination, and his work in bilingual and Asian American representation in education.

The human rights activist and former sharecropper once said that “you are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, photographer Leni Sinclair stood at the center of a local scene where political and cultural ferment merged.