Excerpts

Death in the magnetic age.

An underdressed reporter journeys across icy, barren Greenland—and into Trump’s bored, nineteenth-century brain.

A complex history weaves along the Trail of Tears to connect Eufaula, Alabama, with its namesake in Oklahoma.

About 1.5 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic in Liverpool ships, but the city's slave trade was barely acknowledged until recently.

Why is Marco Rubio so hell-bent on making Iran-Contra again?

It all might have been different without one night in 1977. A scandal followed—and, five decades later, no one agrees on what happened.

In the early 1980s Tucson, activists and religious leaders joined forces to protect refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border, galvanizing the Sanctuary Movement.

A myth and its legacy.

What we have long accepted about one of the most galvanizing war photographs of all time may not be true. Can history be rewritten?

A century ago, artists who survived the trenches captured humanity’s capacity for destruction. What can they teach us in a new age of genocide?

Doctor, writer, musician, and orator: Rudolph Fisher was a scientist and an artist whose métier was Harlem.

The private-equity billionaire spent decades building influence in the capital. Then his philanthropy collided with the president.

Who was George Eyser, the one-legged German-American gymnast who astounded at the Olympic Games?

Slavery in Latin America, on a huge scale, was different from that in the United States. Why don’t we know this history?

After 9/11, he used his role as President George W. Bush’s chief strategist to approve the use of torture and steer U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The 'Social Register' was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful. It was also the perfect hit list.

Technology changes us—and it is currently changing us for the worse.

How Hollywood killed celluloid.

New York's skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that warms the city. While everywhere else moved to hot water, Manhattanites still buy steam.

In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and monopolies, he thinks he can do it again.

Benedict Arnold’s boot wouldn’t come off, and other hardships from my weekend in the Revolutionary War.

Across the ideological spectrum, it’s become a bedrock value. What does it mean?

Through his work in both the Teamsters and the NAACP, Ernest Calloway embodied the potential of a united labor and civil rights movement.

The site’s volunteers face threats from Trump, billionaires, and AI.

Academic freedom from the Middle Ages to apartheid South Africa to now.

In 1969, Otis Moss Jr led a push to ensure diversity among Santa Clauses. But the fight, he says, continues to this day.

A brief history of our most rebellious musical genre, as seen through its DIY zines.

If we dismiss concepts because of particular examples of misuse, we encourage the repression of discomforting histories and ideas.

The Thrilla in Manila nearly killed Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

No one remembers the assassination of Congressman James M. Hinds. What do we risk by making it just another part of American history?

A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution.

In the early days of flight, airships were hailed as the future of war. Then disaster struck the USS Akron.

The administration is trying to neuter the redistributive and protective arms of the state, while exploiting its bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport.

Reporters engage in charm and betrayal; checkers are in the harm-reduction business.

Through genetic testing, millions of Americans have discovered family secrets. The news has upended relationships and created a community looking for answers.

Only one cousin is in a position of power — and his family can only watch helplessly as he destroys much that they stood for.

Attempts to end birthright citizenship thwart an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.

For decades, US hostility towards Russia and continued NATO encroachment ever further into Eastern Europe have laid the groundwork for the current crisis.

He made his name in Chicago investigating race riots, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But America’s first Black private eye was hiding his own secrets.

Nietzsche’s continued presence and resonance in America suggests that he never forgot his Emersonian inheritance.

As plans are laid for a new casino, one can trace, through four figures, a history of rivalry and excess, rife with collisions of character and crime.

On the life, influences, and “sophisticated yet lucid brand of Marxism” of the late, great writer.

To restore public trust and prepare for the next pandemic, we need a reckoning with the U.S. experience—what worked, and what didn’t.

The psychiatric hospitals promoted by Thomas Story Kirkbride and Dorothea Dix were quickly overcrowded and underfunded — a failure that haunts us today.

Dishing the African diaspora in Brazil and the United States.

The agency once projected America’s loftiest ideals. Then it ceded its ambitions to Elon Musk.

In working through the Winter case files, I often felt pinpricks of déjà vu: an exact turn of phrase, an absurdly specific expenditure.

A discipline born from the study of the Holocaust faces its contradictions as Israel stands accused of the “crime of crimes.”

During the Reagan revolution, Democrats settled on a new way to win—and it’s destroying them now.

A dark mystery shocked America in the early 1990s, from prime-time shows to Congress. It’s largely been forgotten. It shouldn’t be.