Excerpts

How a mob statute metastasized.

Thousands of Indigenous children suffered and died in residential ‘schools’ around the world. Their stories must be heard.

How much truth and healing can forensic tech really bring? On the sites of Native American tragedies, Marsha Small has made it her life’s mission to find out.

The Manson Family murders weren’t a countercultural revolt. They were about power, entitlement, and Hollywood.

Heritage animal breeding has transformed living history museums and challenged both the public and historians to reconsider colonial Americans’ animal world.

His works underpins the Dobbs decision. His legacy matters enormously to what's next for constitutional law.

Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history.

Lyndon Johnson and the events in Dallas.

Lawyers tried to use the independent-state-legislature theory to sway the outcomes of the 2000 and 2020 elections. What if it were to become the law of the land?

Gas stations caused a $20 billion toxic mess — and it’s not going away.

Thomas Dixon’s racist discourse lurks in American politics and society even today.

Images were important in defining the Republic between the Revolution and the Civil War and they distinctively both did and did not show Americans in need.

An effort to memorialize the homestead of one of Oregon’s first Black farmers illuminates the land’s complicated history.

The genocide of Native Americans was nowhere more methodically savage than in California. A new state initiative seeks to reckon with this history.

The rediscovery of demos performed by the songwriters of the legendary Memphis recording studio reveals a hidden history of soul.

Tying frilly white doves and normative bride-and-groom couples to feminist art and DIY craft practices that offer opportunities for creativity and fantasy.

Every five years, the farm bill brings together Democrats and Republicans. The result is the continued corporatization of agriculture.

Survivors of Kissinger's secret war in Cambodia reveal unreported mass killings.

Who disbanded Iraq’s army and de-Baathified its bureaucracy?

Mack McCormick’s long, tortured quest to find the real Robert Johnson.

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.

In the 20th century, a moral economy of “whites-only” wealth animated federal policies and programs that created the propertied white middle class.

Colonial currencies and the pan-American origins of the dollar system.

For more than seven decades American roads were dotted with the familiar orange roof and blue cupola of the ubiquitous Howard Johnson’s restaurants and Motor Lodges.

What replaced imprisonment for debt was something that has become a mainstay of American life: bankruptcy.

The history of the L.A. Times.

For thousands of years, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids along the Mississippi River.

The humble drinking fountain can tell us much about a society’s attitudes towards health, hygiene, equity, virtue, public goods and civic responsibilities.

The selling of the Iraq war.

Rustin’s assessment of the lay of the political land was predicated on a no-nonsense understanding of the radicalism of the moment.

Can it be produced without controversy?

The hidden history of Utopian Socialism and its close relationship with cultures of esoteric spirituality in the nineteenth-century United States. 

Oliver North and his cronies in the Contra support operations put in motion a clandestine counter-intelligence apparatus to disrupt the flow of information.

What we fight about when we fight about schools.

The flawed logic that produced the war is alive and well.

To demand the freedom to mourn—not on the employer’s schedule, but in our own time—is to reject the cruel rhythms of the capitalist status quo.

A set of revered stone deities stolen from a temple in northwestern India can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking.

A Harvard education professor explains how far we've come in answering some of the most important questions in education since the famous Coleman report.

What does a statue dedicated to mothers reveal about women’s rights?

In the late 1960s, Baltimore began demolishing Black neighborhoods to make room for an ill-fated expressway. Will the harm from the Highway to Nowhere ever be repaired?

He fell from favor after the disaster of the Iraq War. But he was always biding his time.

A helpful way to think about the JFK assassination, and political assassinations more generally, is to be more Dragnet about it than discursive.

Lee's life and work suggested that Asian American identity did not possess—and did not need—any underlying reality beyond solidarity.

Religious conservatives see “anti-eugenic” laws as the most promising path to establish a federal ban on abortion.

Heirs to an iconic fortune sought out a wealth manager who would assuage their progressive consciences. Now their dispute is exposing dynastic secrets.

A historian’s journey into the relationship between Alexander Darnes and Edmund Kirby Smith starts with a surprising eulogy.

The remains of more than 100,000 Native Americans are held by prestigious U.S. institutions, despite a 1990 law meant to return them to tribal nations.

On the value of the discipline and its applications.

At the frontier of American empire.

In opulent seaside Newport, a wealthy and beloved Black businessman turns up dead. The resulting trial will tear the town in two.