Excerpts

How three eras of racial progress gave way to the presidencies of Johnson, Nixon, and Trump.

For 70 years, irrational fear of low-level radiation blocked the path to an energy-rich future. We must get over it.

A refresher on the original intent of John Quincy Adams's 1823 policy statement in the wake of the recent announcement of the "Trump Corollary."

How America learned not to fear the inner self but lost its places of belonging.

A Quaker abolitionist hoped to convince the Virginian Founders to end slavery by appealing to their sense of manhood. They were not persuaded.

The libertarian propaganda series is back and worse than ever.

Long before the Trail of Tears, English colonists drove Maryland’s Indigenous tribes from their land. Piscataway descendants want people to know their history.

More than 75 years ago, one veteran fought the U.S. government’s right-wing blacklists. Today, we should learn from his example.

Kitzmiller 20 years on.

It all might have been different without one night in 1977. A scandal followed—and, five decades later, no one agrees on what happened.

The Mass Market paperback format is ending with a whimper.

Whatever happened to journalism?

Nationalism chooses sides in the most awful family drama of all time. It sides with the evildoers, and never with their victims, and teaches you to do the same.

Descended from Jewish immigrants, Stephen Miller's project is to close the country to people like his ancestors.

The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments are in trouble.

The paper’s Gaza coverage continues its pattern of downplaying US-backed atrocities in Bangladesh, East Timor, and Guatemala.

In the early 1980s Tucson, activists and religious leaders joined forces to protect refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border, galvanizing the Sanctuary Movement.

After years of delays, construction is set to begin on the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial.

The “Jewish Question” is a scapegoating conspiracy. This essay traces its appeal, partial truths, and why it falsely absolves America of blame.

A myth and its legacy.

Why jury size matters.

In April 1962, Pete Seeger was abruptly banned from performing a scheduled set for children in Pittsburgh. The surrounding debate says a lot about the city.

The important moral and tactical contributions of African-American soldiers in the Union Army.

What winter was like before the stove revolution, and the tension between comfort and family values.

The Declaration drew on Enlightenment ideas to assert equality, justify independence, and inspire lasting debates over rights and slavery.

The documentary depicts the kind of maverick journalism we desperately need in our authoritarian times.

Jeffrey Epstein helped Leslie Wexner repurpose the CIA’s Iran–Contra planes from arms smuggling to shipping lingerie.

Exploring Henry David Thoreau's meticulous track of natural phenomena.

The enormous scale of death in the Civil War, and how it altered the American way of dying.

The hosts discuss the history of American war memorials.

The Chicago Outfit’s second life as nostalgia—and as presidential politics.

With the death of Norman Podhoretz at 95, the transition from New York’s intellectual golden age to the age of grievance and provocation is complete.

A decade before the mainstream Black Arts Movement, Detroit underwent a transformation of its own.

On U.S.-American Indian treaty-making and Ely Parker's role in its abolition.

The Founders didn’t model us on the Six Nations, and George Washington didn’t tomahawk a Frenchman.

Barbara Rose Johns was only 16 when she led a walkout in 1951 to protest horrendous conditions at her segregated high school in rural Virginia.

In the 1830s, college students protested slavery. Many colleges and elites wanted them to stop. 

Lessons from a 1975 proposal for a state-owned public bank.

In 1774 Virginia surveyors risked frontier war to claim western lands for veterans, exposing land hunger, imperial ambition, and Native conflict.

The movement’s success was never a given. It took much longer and required tremendous sacrifice without certainty it would work

The brief creative collision of two superstars.

Born in the Mon Valley, Bonosky transformed from a devout Catholic into a committed Communist writer, chronicling the struggles of working-class immigrants.

During the Red Scare, a 1947 FBI report alleged the beloved holiday film contained subtly subversive anti-American propaganda.

The long struggle for the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Reflections on the book and lessons for the present environmental movement.

Ken Burns’s newest docuseries may have its shortcomings, but others looking to tell the story of the Founding could learn from his attention to detail.

A survey of recent Austen-related books and artworks to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth.

Roosevelt’s popularity, charisma, and progressive politics.

The high-stakes struggle to make women’s history visible to all Americans.

On the rhetoric and failure of the Hoover administration.