Excerpts

In 1947, the United States sacrificed for the sake of a starving Europe.

A new book calls white evangelicals to reckon with the fact that the groundwork for their movement was laid, in part, by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI.

The role of family in Huey P. Newton's educational journey.

A fatal combination of fear, power, and hubris.

From Underground Railroad conductors who risked everything to present-day residents who show kindness to travelers.

The region has been in the disruption business for nearly 150 years.

How dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.

Plants and settlers take root in a new mythology of Arizona.

In the 19th century, food science promised to improve the health, robustness, and productivity of humankind.

The experiences of Michael and Zoharah Simmons show that the fight against the carceral state is embedded in a larger project of building a just world.

The unconventional origins of the modern antiwar movement.

My mother’s part in the 1970 repeal of New York’s abortion law is a lesson for today’s activists: all politics is local.

Black refugees’ journey from Virginia to Boston after the Civil War.

Isabella Stewart Gardner builds a place to house her art.

From Bikram yoga to Tae Bo, the 1990s exploded with exoticized consumer fitness products.

“For those Afro-Caribbean Panamanian who had lived through Panama’s Canal Zone apartheid, Brooklyn segregation probably came as no surprise.”

Predicting a hurricane in nineteenth-century South Carolina.

Nineteenth-century New York City was filled with books, bibliophilia, and marginalia.

The banjo did not exist before it was created by the hands of enslaved people in the New World.

The FBI’s successful campaign against white supremacists is also a cautionary tale.

The Police Beat Algorithm’s outputs were not so much predictive of future crime as they were self-fulfilling prophesies.

The author of a book about William Still unearths new details about the leading Black abolitionist—and reflects on his lost legacy.

The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism.

Considering the lessons and history of Crockett Johnson’s classic.

The story of Motley's legal career prior to Brown v. Board, and her crucial participation in it.

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s unique blend of traditional and progressive sensibilities.

The elixir had antifreeze, for flavor. Nobody blinked—at first.

Pseudonyms allowed Adams to audition ideas and venture out on limbs without fear of reprisal.

How the city's urban and suburban landscape shaped its alternating history of oppression and opportunity.

Before Geronimo met any white Americans or came to think of them as enemies of the Apaches, he spent years fighting Mexicans.

That status has been taken as obvious, then questioned, then reasserted over the decades.

Several years before the United States officially entered World War II, Black Americans were tracking the international spread of fascism.

Faculty and staff once owned slaves, and professors taught racial eugenics.

On the legal challenges to racist presidential policy that led to the Trail of Tears.

Like so many other reluctant revolutionaries in New York, he seemed the antithesis of the rabble in arms that the British identified with the mobocracy.

The death of Elma Sands and the Manhattan Company.

On “all wars” memorials.

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.

Rather than a “colonial America,” we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial.

An excerpt from a new book on the so-called "Jewish Kennedys."

Forty-one of the 561 enslaved Africans on board the "Guerrero" died when the illegal slave ship sank off the Florida Keys in 1827.

Describing the experiences of radicals who lived in, traveled to, or found themselves in Mexico between 1910 and 1920.

The story of the modern web is often told through the stories of Google, Facebook, Amazon. But eBay was the first conqueror.

Service members were attacked, discredited, and shortchanged on GI benefits—with lasting implications.

How Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, a star-studded cemetery in Los Angeles, corporatized mourning in America.

As Republicans denounce climate change as a “hoax” and dismantle the environmental regulatory state they worked to build, we are left to wonder: What happened?

When James G. Blaine went to war with his son's ex-wife in the national press, he had no idea that two could play that game.

The early history of rating credit in America.

In 1967, I was in the middle of one of the world’s buzziest stories.

An excerpt from "The Hidden History of Neoliberalism."