Excerpts

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

No, aliens haven’t visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?

Tom Scully is as responsible as anyone for the way health care in America works today.

How Detroit cops and courts steer segregation and drive incarceration.

A windowless telecommunications hub, 33 Thomas Street in New York City embodies an architecture of surveillance and paranoia, an ideal set for conspiracy thrillers.

Cecil Brown wants to digitally revive the enslaved antebellum poet George Moses Horton. Can digital technology help reconnect us to the tradition he embodied?

How transphobia has been a consistent liability for Republicans, and why the right refuses to give it up.

In the 1950s, the U.S. military conducted unethical radiological experiments on Black communities, including the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex.

What happened to the Bailey family in the Detroit suburb of Warren became a flashpoint in the national battle over integration.

America's forgotten migration – the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South.

The 1619 Project claimed to reveal the unknown history of slavery. It ended up helping to distort the real history of slavery and the struggle against it.

Oppenheimer and the demon heart of power.

The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?

Among America's political elite, 5 living presidents, 2 Supreme Court justices, 11 governors, and 100 legislators have ancestors who enslaved Black people.

An unlikely alliance in antebellum America.

The far-flung tale of a murder song.

The university’s Peabody Museum exploited loopholes to prevent repatriation to the Wabanaki people while still staying in compliance with NAGPRA.

Henry Kissinger’s Vietnam diary shows that he knew the war was lost a decade before it ended.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives.

After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, was to be tried for treason. Does the debacle hold lessons for the trials awaiting Donald Trump?

John Brown and the Secret Six—the abolitionists who funded the raid on Harpers Ferry—confronted a question as old as America: When is violence justified?

Is the cost worth the payoff?

One thing’s for sure: The CIA doesn’t want you to know.

Almost 175 years after the Gold Rush began, Californians are left holding the bag for thousands of abandoned mines.

Environmental radicalism, left and right.

The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.

A talk with family, turpentine workers, historians, chefs, foresters, and beer brewers to get to the root of the rosin potato's origins.

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth transformed America’s pastime by becoming a new kind of star.

Supported and largely led by slaveholders, the American Revolution was also, paradoxically, a profound antislavery event.

His “Clash of Civilizations” essay in Foreign Affairs turned 30 this year. It was provocative, influential, manna for the modern right—and completely and utterly not true.

Exclusive interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and a long-buried memo reveal new details about one of the 20th century's biggest scoops.

Suspected of orchestrating the Lincoln assassination, the South’s most prominent Jew escaped to London to start a new life as a high-powered lawyer.

Rather than viewing strikes as a last-resort bargaining tactic, the labor movement must embrace them as engines of political transformation.

A biography of the towers that became "bane as well as boon to lower Manhattan."

An exploration of the family stories, Southern territory, and distortions of memory that Lucinda Williams' songwriting evokes.

Shelby Foote, failed novelist and closeted member of the Tribe, turned the Civil War into a masterpiece of American literature.

Like the spies themselves, the image we have of something is often what gets us in trouble.

In the early years of Brooklyn’s gentrification, a 1977 New Yorker piece by Jervis Anderson captured the process in a freeze-frame.

On September 4, 1973, an enormous multitude of Chileans poured into the streets of Santiago to back the besieged government of Salvador Allende.

What does the academy have against the mother of second-wave feminism?

Harriet Beecher Stowe said that Josiah Henson’s life had inspired her most famous character. But Henson longed to be recognized by his own name.

Former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, largely silent for 60 years, says he found a bullet in Kennedy’s limo. Here's why that’s so significant, if true.

Repression, mediation, and division of Black resistance from 1906 to the 2020 George Floyd Uprising.

Sixty-plus years ago, the white leaders of Newport News, Virginia, seized the core of a thriving Black community to build a college.

Huey P. Newton has been mythologized and maligned since his murder 34 years ago. His family and friends offer an intimate look inside his life and mind.

The records of a New York surveillance committee from the time of the First Red Scare document a radical world—and its demise.

American leaders called the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki our 'least abhorrent choice,' but there were alternatives to the nuclear attacks.

The Smithsonian’s human brains collection was led by Ales Hrdlicka, a museum curator in the 1900s who believed that White people were superior.

The Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa—with a little help from the mob—built Las Vegas as we know it today.

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence– but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans.