Excerpts

Oscar Hartzell convinced thousands of Americans that they could get a piece of the Sir Francis Drake estate—a multibillion-dollar inheritance that didn’t exist.

The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.

What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?

Grassroots support for public banks early in the 20th century revealed the popularity of socialism-aligned economic ideas.

Drawn to communities of German socialist expatriates in the area, Marx once considered making his way to Texas.

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.

On the economic system of Silicon Valley.

How the Wakasa stone, a memorial to a Japanese man murdered in a Utah internment camp, became the flash point of a bitter modern dispute.

Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg, the largest living museum that is taking a radical approach to our national divides.

Activists in Georgia have been re-enacting the infamous 1946 murders of two black men and their wives.

Who can migrate to the US and make their home here? Who gets to drop US-made bombs, and who is expected to suffer them? These are not unrelated questions.

Tracing the transformation of the Great Plains to the widespread belief in “manifest destiny,” and weighing the power of words to shape landscapes.

African American insurance and the actuarial double bind.

Cardboard boxes hold a world of meaning that spans from Amazon to the Container Corporation of America.

The U.S. government’s failure to recognize nuclear Downwinders in New Mexico is part of a broader failure to reckon with the legacies of the Manhattan Project.

In the Mad Men era of magazine journalism, Virginia Kraft was a globe-trotting writer and a deadly shot with a rifle. Why hasn't anyone heard of her?

Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s dark vision of the future.

On the private and public lives of the author of “The Fire Next Time” and “Giovanni’s Room.”

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the age of surveillance.

After the apocalypse that wasn’t.

Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of civilians killed by a carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose.

The company found its own toxic compounds in human blood—and kept selling them.

Insulin transforms a sick body. It also has the potential to reconstitute our political economic realities.

Rereading Priscilla Wald’s "Contagious" and Nancy Tomes’ "Gospel of Germs" amidst a 21st-century pandemic.

America's environmental movement has always been moralistic, which has made it bad at weighing tradeoffs. This accounts for its successes and also its failures.

Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built.

Revisiting the AAUP's 1971 UCLA investigation.

As the first Native American Cabinet member, the Secretary of the Interior has made it part of her job to address the travesties of the past.

Character codes have been evolving through multiple systems over multiple centuries, this is the story.

Film and television writers face an existential threat.

The ultimate semantic receivers, selectors, and transmitters are still us.

Planning, market coordination, and the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.

The shuttering of the GM works in Lordstown will also bury a lost chapter in the fight for workers’ control.

The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, and one of the most persistent.

The UN’s failure to dismantle the colonial order foreclosed the application of the Genocide Convention to Israel, South Africa, and the United States.

The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.

The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time.

Who was buried in the lonely grave in New York’s potter’s field? The year-long search led to a lost world in the history of AIDS.

Textbook watchdogs Mel and Norma Gabler are good, sincere, dedicated people, who just may be destroying your child’s education.

City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.

A summary of how white migration out of the postbellum South entrenched Confederate culture across the U.S. during postwar reconciliation.

Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives.

Extractive industries filling public university coffers on stolen land. Here's how 14 land-grant colleges took 8.2 million acres from 123 Indigenous nations.

A Californian politician's disastrous expedition to seize Mexican land, and how newspapers spun the story.

The long history of benevolence, self-help, and parades in New Orleans.

Feminist. Preacher. Abolitionist. Civil rights pioneer. Now the full story of the American icon's life and faith is finally coming to light.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, Geronimo, Robert Oppenheimer, Steven Spielberg, and the mysteries of New Mexico's desert.

Comparing the struggles of Mexican and Greek immigrants to the United States.

The invasion is still the most important foreign policy decision by a 21st century U.S. president, so the surfeit of analysis should surprise no one.

In 1950s America, the Cold War was raging, but socialists were playing key roles in the early civil rights movement.