Excerpts

The “Middle Class Nation” and “American Exceptionalism” found each other late, and under specific circumstances.

An excerpt from a new book that explores the threat of made-up monsters in the age of imperial conquest.

Jon Sternfeld on collective memory and history as instruction.

Langston Hughes, "poet laureate of Harlem," dreamed of an America that lived up to its ideals.

The polarized dialogue over Vietnam and the civil rights movement convinced Ginsberg that America was teetering on the precipice of a fall.

Jill Filipovic on the generation that changed everything.

Reform was framed as a way of removing “politics” from postal affairs and giving more autonomy to postal management. In time, it would prove to do neither.

Monsters have always patrolled the margins of the map. By their very strangeness, they determined the boundaries of the regular world.

Examining the life of Father Divine, the black preacher who called for the destruction of racial separation and claimed to be God.

Remembering "Hiroshima," the story that changed everything.

Miles Harvey on the life and times of James J. Strang.

Revisiting John Hersey's groundbreaking "Hiroshima."

Studying Hurricane Katrina as a discrete event is studying a fiction.

An excerpt from a new graphic biography of Jack Kirby, the "King of Comics."

For Baldwin, the past had always been bent in service of a lie. Could a true story be told?

Robin D.G. Kelley on the predecessors to Antifa.

J. Chester Johnson on the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919.

Martin Luther King Jr. proposed a fix for America’s poisoned soul: ending the Vietnam War.

Watching disease spread and kill on slave ships.

Decades after the war, a group of prosecutors and historians discovered the truth about a mysterious SS training camp in occupied Poland.

Visiting the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Dorothy Thompson finds a room of her own.

My whole life, my mother told me, ‘Always remember — you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.’

Jerry Mitchell revisits a dark episode in the struggle for civil rights.

What happened to the former Main Street of Syrian America.

From Ansel Adams to Rebecca Norris Webb, we trace the symbiotic relationship that the parks and photography have developed over 150 years.

A now-famous Puritan sermon was nothing special in its own day.

Don't let anyone tell you revolutionary history is boring.

Clare Beams on women's bodies and the power of names.

Until the mid-20th century, Oregon was perhaps the most racist place outside the southern states, possibly even of all the states.

Three decades ago, California was the launchpad for a virulent strain of anti-immigrant politics that soon spread nationwide.

A day-by-day account of the historic summit in Yalta, seventy-five years later.

A Pompous Doctor, a Racist Bureaucracy, and More. From the book "Black Death at the Golden Gate".

Ayelet Waldman on the landmark case O’Connor v. Donaldson.

It happens every year.

Although the British settlers imported Africans from the first as slaves, the earliest Virginians had yet to establish many basic rules regarding slavery.

Activists today are taking up Dr. King’s mantle and reviving the Poor People’s Campaign.

Contending with the orientalist fears and fantasies of a young nation.

An excerpt from a new book reveals how Disneyland came to be.

“The country cannot prosper if its cities are decaying.”

Mo Rocca on the struggle to depathologize homosexuality.

An excerpt from ‘We Return Fighting,’ a groundbreaking exploration of African American involvement in World War I.

When America’s first aerial cameraman met an infamous spirit photographer, the chemistry was explosive.

Expanding the radical promise of the American Revolution.

Lizabeth Cohen on the poverty and prosperity of the American city.

In the mid-20th century, Playboy wasn't just an erotic magazine. It was an architectural movement as well.

Frank Olson died in 1953, but it took decades for his family to get closer to the truth.

American revolutionaries had a far wider range of reasons for supporting rebellion than we often assume.

Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio Pecan Shellers Strike of 1938.

The complicated privilege of forming a new constituency.