Excerpts

On why he became a public thinker, the relationship between race and class, and his work in light of new histories of capitalism.

Suicide during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

“How to Hide an Empire,” explores America far beyond the borders of the Lower 48.

The author of a new biography explains how Murray changed the way that discrimination is understood today.

The co-winners of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize on researching slavery.

A new book traces the “citymaking process” of riots and rebellions since the era of Dutch colonization to the present.

The U.S. did not always find it necessary to lock up people seeking asylum.

From Davy Crockett to Teddy Roosevelt, this is the legacy of hunting in American culture.

A member of the 1960s-70s collective Computer People for Peace talks about the early days of tech worker organizing.

Historian Mae Ngai reflects on how a century of immigration law created a crisis.

A new book bursts the bubble on what we’ve learned about the Civil Rights era to show a larger movement with layers.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

On Douglass’s monumental life, the voice of the biographer, memory and tragedy, and why history matters right now.

How postwar Christmas embraced spaceships, nukes, and cellophane.

Four historians weigh in on evangelicals' affinity for Trump – and their commitment to the conservative movement more broadly.

Author Sarah Churchwell on the entangled history of America’s most loaded phrases.

On writing the story of America, the rise and fall of the fact, and how women’s intellectual authority is undermined.

What can their fascination with the supernatural teach us about life in our own post-truth times?

An interview with horror historian David J. Skal.

A new book offers lessons drawn from Harper Lee's ambivalent treatment of this iconic character.

How voter suppression became a political weapon in American politics.

African American educators became the ‘hidden provocateurs’ who spearheaded the push for racial justice in education.

A hurricane historian talks about the still-unfolding disaster in Puerto Rico.

A century-old image and the film it inspired.

The FBI has long tried to destroy socialist organizations, but its actions aren't limited to surveillance.

A new book conjures the complexity of the Bay Area and the perils of its immense, uneven wealth.

Muzzleloaders have evolved into smart-style automatic firearms in just 150 years.

When residents of the U.S. came to see Latin Americans as partners in a shared revolutionary experiment.

In a new book, a historian explores the American fascination with conversion, and its costs. 

The Founding Fathers were more interested in limiting democracy than securing and expanding it.

Simeon Wade describes visiting Death Valley with Michel Foucault in 1975.

Remembering how the white working class got left out of the New Left, and why we're all paying for it today.

Elizabeth Hinton discusses how twentieth-century policymakers anticipated the explosion of the prison population.

His photo of Kim Phuc was a transformative moment in a horrible conflict.

Here's what we've learned about mass protests since the 1917 Silent Parade.

The precedents for Trump’s hyped-up immigration crackdown.

What E.B. White, Mickey Spillane, Death Wish, hip-hop, and the “Summer of Hell” have in common.

With so little documentary evidence about his life, he is a virtual blank slate upon which different people at different times have inscribed a variety of meanings.

A Q&A with the author of "Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America."

The banjo's history and its symbolism of community, slavery, resistance, and ultimately America itself.

Max Pine, 91, believes that one day “the Republicans will leap ahead of the Democrats and lead in its enactment.”

Columbia professor Richard R. John explains the history of U.S. monopolies and why antimonopoly should not be conflated with antitrust.

How every major industry and marketplace in America came to be controlled by a single, monolithic player.

A housing policy expert explains how federal government policies created the suburbs and the inner city.

On revolution and violence.

Historian Sara Yael Hirschhorn explains what has driven some American Jews to the most contentious real estate on earth.

Why an historian is compiling a digital database of the military records of 200,000+ black Union soldiers.

Experts weigh in on how historians of the future may assess President Trump's achievements after his first 100 days in office.

How 18th-century British arms sales, the slave trade, and the Revolutionary War contributed to the mess we have today.

An interview with Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf.