Excerpts

Because of the growth of the Prohibition state, police abuse fomented considerable discussions among police and lawyer associations, criminologists, and others.

The slow unraveling of a nation’s suburbs.

How The Go-Go’s emerged from the LA punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album.

“It was made under the worst of conditions,” the filmmaker reveals in a new book. “People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle.”

How "Behold a Pale Horse" found its way to the Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep’s Prodigy, Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, NAS, and more.

Baby brokers often tricked Indigenous Mayan women into giving up newborns; kidnappers took others. International adoption is now seen as a cover for war crimes.

The new punk generation made the hippies look past their prime.

On the pro-business transformation of the Democratic Party.

George Leonidas Leslie is still waiting for his HBO series.

The Lakota advocate helped thousands of domestic abuse survivors, Native and non-Native alike.

The symbolic battles of World War I.

Creating a personal myth allows celebrities to create just that—a myth.

On the terror that filled the void left by the retreat of federal authority in the South.

Retro was not the antithesis to the sub- and countercultural experiments of the 1960s, it grew directly out of them.

Even if her husband was a murderer, a woman in a bad marriage once had few options. Unless she fled to South Dakota.

The relationship between two true believers in American exceptionalism.

Many of the CIA analysts who spotted the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise were female. They had trouble getting their warnings heard.

Fierce disagreements over Zionism have played out from the movement’s inception among Jews, including community leaders who worried it would spark antisemitism.

On the early years of America's chronicler of the Great Plains.

A photographer excavates personal history through reconstruction of Adams's World War II photographs of Japanese Americans.

When Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, her views on abortion became a source of intense speculation.

One of the biggest challenges for the NYPD, especially in the years following the turn of the twentieth century, was policing the newcomer immigrants.

Why is surfing still stuck in the 1960s when women have always done it?

Making sense of anti-Semitism today requires examining Henry Ford’s outsize part in its origins.

No, roving bands of medieval Scandinavians did not visit West Virginia. (So far as we know.)

From Jefferson's viewpoint, Native peoples could claim a title to their homelands, but they did not own that land as private property.

James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?

On ramps, xonacatl, skunk eggs and more.

Why did future members of the modernist literary movement darken their skin, speak fake Swahili, and board a British battleship?

American thinkers consider what the already occupied West could fund.

Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America's haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.

From homesteaders to tourists to the U.S. Army, railroads flooded the Great Plains with people who saw bison as pests, amusements, or opportunities for profit.

How English words evolved on a foreign continent.

W.E.B. Du Bois’ message to African American artists.

A new book links the rise of American prisons to the expansion of American power around the globe.

The story of Mabel Ping‑Hua Lee.

On upending the accepted narrative of the movement.

Chris Waltz was appalled. He felt Democrats were using the Sandy Hook tragedy to tell him he wasn’t responsible enough to own an AR-15.

Reconstruction-era opponents of racial equality popularized the charge that protecting civil rights would amount to the end of capitalism.

There have always been two Americas. One based in religious zeal, mythology, and inequality; and one grounded in rule of the people and the pursuit of equality.

Gloria Steinem on the making of America's first feminist publication.

On the history of whaling and how we understand energy consumption.

Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.

The founding and funding of conservative media on college campuses in the 1960s.

The Index of Deep Disadvantage reflects a more holistic view of how we can define "poverty."

On the importance of material ownership in the context of Black history.

The actual, and mythic, roles played by Irish immigrants in New York now fed the imaginations of the young Irish immigrants carving space for themselves in the 1980s.

Despite facing political headwinds and raising 'suspicion' among publishers, 'Reading Rainbow' introduced generations of American kids to books.

“I’ve learned, through hundreds of interviews and years of research, is that what crack really did was expose every vulnerability of society.”

On the complex relationship between Black Americans and the Black church.