Excerpts

The story of the "battle of the bulge."

The unintended consequences of the 20th amendment.

Declassified records begin to detail the U.S. negotiating strategy in the historic accord.

The First Lady of Black country is from Houston, but her name isn’t Beyoncé. It’s Esther Phillips.

Caroline Winterer tells Peter about a debate over practicality and purpose in higher education after the Civil War, and how the humanities offered a solution.

For years, the U.S. Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee reviewed ideas for commemorative coins marking America’s 250th anniversary.

The physicist fought for the promise of a diverse, meritocratic America. We need his optimism today.

By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.

Donald Trump is once again threatening war with Iran just six months after bombing the Islamic Republic in June.

On violence and disorder in the early years of UVA, and the threat it posed to Thomas Jefferson’s vision for American higher education.

On the racist errors that caused a significantly Black parish in Colorado to lose a hallmark of African-American liturgy.

Cold War nuclear testing left troubling levels of Cesium-137 in caribou, prompting years of research into Arctic fallout and its risks to human health.

Why is Marco Rubio so hell-bent on making Iran-Contra again?

Crumb's work was called sexist, racist, and obscene, but even his critics often acknowledged that he was hilarious and original.

History shows that forcing rulers from power rarely works. Even apparently successful regime changes often leads to bitter civil war.

A scholar of international law on the implications of the U.S. arrest of President Nicolás Maduro.

Virtues we now aspire to were once habits people vowed to quit.

The intellectual world that Norman Podhoretz created.

A history of Hawai‘i’s aikāne relationships between men and how they were reshaped and suppressed after the arrival and moral influence of Western missionaries.

How the modern Left can carry his radical legacy forward.

A new film depicts part of the long history of Shaker worship.

The Internet was not meant to suck.

Religious liberty owes much to Jefferson and Madison, but the "impregnable wall" doesn't do justice to the founders vision.

One man’s struggle to pick a side of the war, his ultimate choice, and how powerful the of concepts “liberty and union” were in motivating Northern soldiers.

Meritocracy and diversity often clash. Roosevelt embodied that tension, struggling to balance talent, inclusion, and equal opportunity.

How the myth says more about Americans’ values and church–state debates than about historical fact.

Hollywood has seen this movie before. Entertainment oligopolies are bigger and more anticompetitive than ever.

In 2018, Trump began to routinely describe immigration as an ‘invasion.’ That rhetoric has fueled deadly violence for nearly two centuries.

Christmas films like to pretend they’re harmless seasonal comfort, but history says otherwise: postwar American cinema used Christmas to negotiate conformity.

Ken Burns’s latest PBS series is long on muskets and bayonets, but the history of the American Revolution remains strangely understated.

In 1905, Upton Sinclair documented the horrors in America’s slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. In 2025, Donald Trump is making them worse.

Why women disproportionately make up the ranks of local government workers responsible for assessing requests for welfare support.

Ford was a raving bigot and a tyrant who wanted complete control over his workers. Ford is a perfect example of why rich capitalists should not run the world.

A forgotten race war in McCarthy-era Miami.

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.