Excerpts

Airlines sometimes bumped Black passengers off of flights to make room for white travelers, even during refueling stops.

An excerpt from a new book that explores the intertwined history of travel segregation and African American struggles for freedom of movement.

People’s stories described a sluggish process of discovery: you had to discover the earthquake, even though it had already been shaking you for what felt like a very long time.

Built on the momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom.

The idea of liberty has often seemed to mean freedom from government and its spending. But there is an alternate history, one just as foundational and defining.

Jackalopes have migrated from Wyoming across the nation, but what’s really known about the mythical creature?

After the passing of William James, mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor.

On the relationships formed and marriages made by the fur trade.

How the Windy City became a Latinx metropolis in the second half of the twentieth century.

Once Peter Parker received his miraculous spider powers, the last thing he wanted to do was go out and get a colorful costume and fight crime.

Over the past century, the United States came to rely ever more on economic coercion—with questionable results.

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.

They weren't about to let all that good camel hair go to waste.

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.

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.