Excerpts

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.

What can we learn from the 19th-century commitment to reusability and upcycling, quality over quantity?

A new book traces the tactics of groundbreaking lawyer Constance Baker Motley amid pivotal protests in Birmingham.

Refusing myths of joy and pain in slave narratives.

Insuring against the cost of insurance itself in Revolutionary-era America.

What the Confederacy actually was: a proslavery anti-democratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.

How the authors of the Depression-era “Business Plot” aimed to take power away from FDR and stop his “socialist” New Deal.

Through slavery, Indian boarding schools, Japanese internment, mass incarceration, and anti-Communist wars against civilian populations in Latin America.

On the nineteenth-century artists and thinkers who pictured a future of abundance powered by steam.

The history of anti-Chinese violence in Truckee, California, is as old as the town itself.

"What the Catholic church wanted us to understand about women and anger—that we simply didn’t experience it—backfired spectacularly."

Thomas Jefferson imagines an unequal gender utopia.

Listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears again.

In 1741, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results help us see how Enlightenment thinkers justified slavery.

How James Baldwin confronted America's most exceptional lie.

On the mythologies behind urban renewal.

At the height of his powers, the Black Nationalist leader was assassinated, and the government botched the investigation of his murder.

What happened to the last million Eastern Europeans in refugee camps in Germany, who refused to return home, or who had no home to return to.

In our own era of uncontrolled working hours, controlling our time is a vision of freedom worth capturing.

In an excerpt from his new book, ‘Let the Lord Sort Them,’ Maurice Chammah explains where a 1970s legal team fighting the death penalty went wrong.

The Columbus Pacesetters weren’t satisfied being an afterthought or a gimmick, so they bought their franchise and the ability to make decisions for themselves.

I had sung the Black National Anthem countless times, but hearing those words reverberate around me in this place, on this day, moved me in a new way.

The inventor thought her pregnant sister looked like “a beach ball in an unmade bed.”

On the robbing of Indigenous graves throughout the 19th-century.

An introduction to salvage anthropology.

How white feminism failed Native Americans in the late-19th century.

On the history (and future) of class struggle in America.

Emily Bass on foreign aid and America's response to long-standing pandemics.

Even as they carve out space for Black scholarship, established universities remain deeply complicit in racial capitalism. We must think beyond them.

When the U.S. first encountered the “Aesthetic Apostle."

An excerpt from the most recent book, "Not 'A Nation of Immigrants': Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion."

On race, borders and belonging.

A brief history of trying to save city streets from pet waste.

On early American attempts to kick out foreigners.

After decades of keeping her identity a secret, Jane Roe’s child has chosen to talk about her life.

"My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.”

Celebrations of multiculturalism obscure the country’s settler colonial history—and the role that immigrants play in perpetuating it.

On the roads and seas miners traveled to reach gold in the United States and Australia.

And the lone forecaster who predicted its deadly path.

The daring women whose transatlantic journeys challenged gender roles.

During the 1860 presidential election, political parties dueled over the intent of the framers.

Whether economic times are good or bad, the lament for the old days of factories and mills never changes.

The ghosts of the uranium boom continue to haunt the land, water and people.

Hell hath no fury like a man with a vaginal douche named after him.

Early Americans conscripted the universe into their nation-building project.

On the rise and fall of radium in the beauty industry.

In the decades after the Civil War, Black Americans warned of the dangers of Confederate monuments.

Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford on the making of a misrepresented narrative.

Hyphenation became a complex issue of identity, assimilation, and xenophobia amid anti-immigration movements at the turn of the twentieth century.

How African Americans came to Indian Territory after the Civil War.