Excerpts

Why does the diagnosis of Gage social ‘disinhibition’ lean so heavily on flimsy documentation about Gage, while overlooking the case of Eadweard Muybridge?

It depends on how you read the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths.

California has long allowed an ambiguous boundary between public and private land along its coast. Climate change is testing the limits of this compromise.

A teacher tells the story of 1974’s Olean, New York High School murders.

History’s academic study is now deeply politicized, with partisan views shaping beliefs and debates over even basic historical facts.

The Interstate Highway System created a national polity defined by circulation. To rethink the Interstates is to rethink the United States.

A historian reviews new books by Peter Beinart, Avi Shlaim and Pankaj Mishra on the project that animates Israel’s violence.

Gertrude Berg’s “The Goldbergs” was a bold, beloved portrait of a Jewish family. Then the blacklist obliterated her legacy.

James Baldwin’s testimony in images.

How could two renowned, high-ranking men of the American Revolution have fallen into such dire straits that they feared the loss of all they worked for?

The Amazon founder was once the newspaper’s savior; now journalists are fleeing as the paper that brought down Nixon struggles under Trump’s second term.

How the “forever business” is changing at New York City’s biggest graveyard.

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.

Can the racialist and eugenicist roots of statistics be cordoned off from “proper” science?

How the discovery of a long-lost monument shattered trust between a Japanese American community and the museum built to preserve its history.

From India to the Amazon to Israel, bulldozers have left a path of destruction that offers a cautionary tale for how technology can be misused.

The Black Panthers shook America before the party was gutted by the government. Their children paid a steep price, but also emerged with unassailable pride.

After decades of unchecked hazardous waste pollution, a Florida hamlet fights the developers eager to build homes there anyway.

Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures.

A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.

Baltimore's long history with its most polarizing pest.

The Ḱamíłpa Band of the Yakama Nation has wanted an end to commercial picking of a critical cultural resource for years.

A global network of maritime archeologists is excavating slave shipwrecks—and reconnecting Black communities to the deep.

Trump, Xi Jinping, and the tariffs.

On Walter Isaacson’s biographical project.

How a clerk on Ellis Island at the dawn of the 20th century documented discrimination through photography, and what that tells us about today’s malaise.

America’s only successful insurrection.

For market radicals and neo-Confederates, secession is the path to a world that’s socially divided but economically integrated—separate but global.

The veterans of Kagnew Station saw the early growth of the surveillance state. Has the passage of time given them a new understanding of their work?

Historian James Oakes offers a critique of the New History of Capitalism.

The left case for an independent Canada.

Why Netflix looks like that.

Today’s Trumpist radicals are not (small-c) conservatives – but they stand in the continuity of Modern Conservatism’s defining political project.

Josie Rudolph’s life, in an era of worldwide migration and colonial ambition, offers a new perspective on the familiar tale of modern Alaska’s birth.

You can argue over whether Jimmy Carter was America’s greatest president, but he was undoubtedly one of the greatest Americans to ever become president.

The Washington Post has found more than three times as many deaths as the U.S. government documented in its investigation of Indian boarding schools.

A story of intrigue and power involving union organizers, Black laundry workers, the Mafia, and the FBI in 1980s Detroit.

In 1893, a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the Islands’ sovereign government. What does America owe Hawai‘i now?

Purposely brutalizing psychological experiments may have confirmed Theodore Kaczynski’s still-forming belief in the evil of science while he was in college.

When the future arrived, it felt…ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?

Women anthropologists, face assault in the field, exposing victim blaming, institutional failures, and ethical gaps in academia.

The financial world is a theatrical production, abundantly lubricated by that magical elixir of illusionists: confidence.

Today’s contentious immigration debate is the construct of one man’s effort to halt overpopulation.

History can make the U.S. better prepared for the specter of protracted large-scale ground combat, which has grown more real in the wake of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The forgotten history of the Lloyd-La Follette Act and of whistleblowing in the federal workforce.

The unraveling of this long-buried atrocity is forging a path toward reconciliation.

How we calculate inflation has always been a subject of debate. Small changes that might seem trivial lead to enormous changes in how well-off we think we are.

American expansionism goes beyond territory.

The weapons infrastructure of the Cold War is now getting rented out on Airbnb or memorialized as patriotic kitsch.

Maine passed its first abortion statute in 1840, not long after the pardon of Dr. Call. Could there be a connection?