Excerpts

An account of the long-lasting effects of nuclear energy in the US.

A Louisiana tribe’s long fight against the American tide.

Time capsules unearthed at affordable housing sites offer alternative, lost, and otherwise obscured histories.

In 1955, just past daybreak, a Chevrolet truck pulled up to an unmarked building. A 14-year-old child was in the back.

On the eve of America’s Bicentennial, a mysterious illness terrifies the country and sends disease detectives racing the clock to find answers.

Twenty years ago my hometown made national headlines when the local college staged an internationally acclaimed play about gay men and the AIDS crisis.

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it.

For centuries, everyone from archaeologists to amateurs pillaged artifacts — and human remains. Now, the FBI is cracking down on those who continue to dig.

Emily Dickinson and the woman in her orbit.

Today, the legendary deputy U.S. marshal is widely believed to be the real Lone Ranger. But his true legacy is even greater.

The incredible story of how a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.

The famed economist’s theories were embraced by Beltway power brokers in both parties. Finally, a Democratic president is turning the page on a legacy of ruin.

For many of us, especially those who weren’t alive when it happened, we’re all watching that event through Zapruder’s lens.

Politicians are suddenly eager to disown failed policies on American prisons, but they have failed to reckon with the history.

In Fayette County, West Virginia, expanding the document of disaster.

With help from the CIA, Paul Engle’s writing students battled Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing still lingers.

Kodak changed the way Americans saw themselves and their country. But it struggled to reinvent itself for the digital age.

Dickens, Tocqueville, and the U.N. all agree about this American invention: It’s torture.

People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?

How the objects in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia can help us understand today's prejudice and racial violence.

At E. 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, a self-organizing network explores what it means to construct and maintain a public memorial.

Patsy Sims reflects on her interview with the man who was instrumental in the death of three black men in Mississippi.

The alcohol epidemic devastated Native American communities, leading to crippling poverty, high mortality rates — and a successful sobriety movement.

The story of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district isn’t well known, but it has never been told in a manner worthy of its importance.

America’s bold response to the Soviet Union depended on an unknown spy agency operative whose story can at last be told.

Detroit police killed hundreds of unarmed Blacks during the civil rights movement. Their ability to get away with it shows why most proposals for police reform are bound to fail.

The history of Atlanta's first Civil War monument may reveal how to deal with them in the present.

The Doomsday Clock is set to two minutes to midnight. So why don't we make movies about nuclear war anymore?

Everything you knew about mass incarceration is wrong.

For decades, flying saucers were a punch line. Then the U.S. government got over the taboo.

Each generation revises his myth. Here’s the true story.

Pete Seeger, William F. Buckley, Jr., and public history.

Patrick Blanchfield tracks the long-standing entanglement of guns and religion in the United States. Part 1 of 2.

How English and Esperanto offer competing visions of a universal language.

Who was behind the "Trumpist manifesto" released twenty years before Trump became president?

A curiously inflexible brand of race-first neoliberalism has taken root in American political discourse.

Whose body was harvested to create a spectacular anatomical specimen, and did that person know they would be on display more than a century later?

What's the matter with left-populism? A review of Thomas Frank's "The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism."

Musicians are in peril, at the mercy of giant monopolies that profit off their work.

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.

Black civil-rights activists—and especially Black women—delivered on the promise of the Founding. Their victories are in peril.

Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick.

At places like the Gettysburg battlefield and Arlington National Cemetery, there's a new, escalating conflict over monuments that honor the Lost Cause.

The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.

In Massachusetts, the inclusion of Native American names and places in local geography has obscured the violence of political and territorial dispossession.

The Trump administration tried and failed to accomplish a count of unauthorized immigrants to reshape Congress, the Electoral College and public policy.

Reckoning with the legacy of Japanese internment in the South.

Mass inequality in the Gilded Age thrived on identity-based partisanship, helping extinguish the fires of class rage. In 2021, we’re headed down the same path.

Abraham Lincoln fought clinical depression all his life. But what would today be treated as a "character issue" gave Lincoln the tools to save the nation.

On the aesthetics and history of the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.