Excerpts

The controversy between players and owners frequently brought baseball into the federal courts between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries.

White racial victimhood was a primary source of power for settlers who served as shock troops for the nation.

News outlets have apologized for past racism. That should only be the start.

In 1790, Philadelphia opened the first American penitentiary, with the nation’s first solitary cells. Black people were disproportionately punished from the start.

Harvard made headlines by announcing that it would devote $100 million to remedying “the harms of the university’s ties to slavery.”

The history of control and decontrol in the oil market.

“We’re the virus.” So read a tweet in March praising reports of less pollution in countries under COVID-19 lockdown. By mid-April, it had nearly 300,000 likes.

Looking back on the George Floyd rebellion.

For more than three centuries, something has been going horribly wrong at the top of our society, and we’re all suffering for it.

Who did neoliberalism?

John Brown and the historical novel.

The iconic songwriter has transcended time and place for 60 years. What should that mean for the rest of us?

David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?

Pauline Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the fight for "The Colored American" magazine.

For nearly all of its modern existence, the Great Dismal Swamp has been excluded from U.S. history. Now there’s a push to bring its significance to light.

The story of America’s most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth.

The attacks on CRT have terrified our educators. But the public school system has always made it hard to teach controversial subjects.

The Timms provide the history behind their collection of 20th century mail-order novelty items.

To understand the tragedy of this war, it is worth going back beyond the last few weeks and months, and even beyond Vladimir Putin.

A case study in re-reading nineteenth-century delegation photography.

The organic compounds that enabled industrialization are having unintended consequences for the planet’s life.

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.

Because of consistent government intervention in the industry, we might call fast food the quintessential cuisine of global capitalism.

How the 33rd president finagled his way to a post–White House fortune — and created a damaging precedent.

Somewhere in Jamaica survive the original cannabis strains that were not burned by American agents or bred to be more profitable.

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.

The New Deal's legacies of infrastructure and economic development, and entrenching structural racism, reveal the potential and mistakes to avoid for the Green New Deal.

Americans of the interwar period were perfectly clear about one fact we have lost sight of today: all fascism is indigenous, by definition.

“Rescue Me,” on repeat.

A century of tax avoidance later, the dynasties created in the 1900s are going strong.

The rise of tactical gun culture among civilians reveals a new front in the U.S. battle against nativist authoritarianism.

The national parks are the closest thing America has to sacred lands, and like the frontier of old, they can help forge our democracy anew.

From the Nye Committee to Joe Kent, the fight against war profiteering is a constant struggle.

In Oakland, California, when it comes to Black homelessness and dispossession, dystopia is already here.

James M. Smith explains the last debates between Loyalists and Patriots prior to the official outbreak of the American Revolution.

Black people own just 2 percent of farmland in the United States. A decades-long history of loan denials at the USDA is a major reason why.

A 90-year-old amateur archaeologist who claimed to have detonated the first atomic bomb was one of the most prolific grave robbers in modern American history.

“Mississippi’s white Appalachians may have owned the earth, but they could never own the past.”

Gay marriage was a victory, we’re told—but a victory for what?

Efforts to rescue African American burial grounds and remains have exposed deep conflicts over inheritance and representation.

The war in Afghanistan was nasty and brutish, marked by the same imperial arrogance that doomed U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Traditional environmentalism has lacked a meaningful, practical democratic vision, rendering it largely marginal to the day-to-day lives of most Americans.

Fissures in the feminist movement should not be buried as signs of failure but worked through as opportunities for insight.

Oakland’s lopsided boom.

As an attorney, Derrick Bell worked on many civil-rights cases, but his doubts about their impact launched a groundbreaking school of thought.

What the history of a gesture can tell us about Black creative power.

Did people first come to this continent by land or by sea?

The books of the last two decades show how overreacting to the attacks unmade America’s values.

On Pete Souza’s Obama.