Excerpts

Kim Stanley Robinson on how the High Sierra has influenced his science fiction.

Michael Washburn explains what we can glean from the failure of Tom Petty's 1985 concept album "Southern Accents."

A conversation with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on his new book, which investigates the co-option of identity politics and the importance of coalitional organizing. 

Nelson “Little D” Ross talks soul and significance with music historian Robert Gordon.

In “Captives,” former Rikers detainee Jarrod Shanahan traces the history of New York City’s sprawling jail complex, and its centrality to brutal class struggle.

An expert on the white-power movement and the “great replacement” theory puts the act of terror in context.

A new book uses the story of a former slave trader who profited after the Civil War by trafficking in convict labor to trace the historical roots of mass incarceration and racial profiling.

Dan Berger interviews Stuart Schrader about his new book on US imperialism.

To fix things, we must acknowledge the nature of the problem.

The rise and fall of the WASP.

They really do not have anything to do with each other.

An interview with Jesse Tarbert about the history of the American state, “big government,” and the legacy of government reform efforts.

The author of new book explains the fraught and turbulent relationship between religion and government in the U.S.

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.