Excerpts

A classic book on UFO believers and their “cognitive dissonance” after aliens failed to land is called into question.

Who was George Eyser, the one-legged German-American gymnast who astounded at the Olympic Games?

In search of the Underground Railroad’s legendary conductor.

David Bohm and Hugh Everett were once ostracized for challenging the dominant thinking in physics. Now, science accepts their ideas.

The settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not escaping religious persecution. They left on the Mayflower to establish a theocracy in the Americas.

Discussing the little-known lineage of leftists who helped shape modern ideas of free trade.

Bonnie Erickson got her start making puppets in Jim Henson's studio, then she became one of America's most beloved mascot designers. Here's how it happened.

In the decades since the Wages for Housework movement, care work has become a site of profit in ways its leaders could never have predicted.

That time Stalin coined the term “American Exceptionalism.”

Charlotte Biltekoff talks about the rise of calories at the turn of the 20th century and the push to get scientific nutritional ideas into American mainstream.

The congressional anti-communist hearings of the 1940s are a reminder that freedom of speech today is even more fragile than it may seem.

Unpacking empires and diaspora in Mexico and the United States.

How a shady car battery additive called AD-X2 sparked a showdown between the U.S. country’s political and scientific establishments.

In some ways, Thanksgiving is a tradition that unites Americans. But the classic image of the Pilgrims obscures important parts of the country’s story.

Adam Shprintzen discusses the 19th-century Americans who saw a vegetarian diet as a powerful tool of moral reform, one that could even put an end to slavery.

On the diet created by Sylvester Graham, designed to ward off a new kind of “health” threat in the liberal 1830s – a masturbation epidemic.

The hosts discuss the transformation of milk from a dangerous, marginalized 19th Century dairy product, to a 20th Century superfood.

What it would mean to take taste seriously again.

Passing your eyes over those first, electric sentences, it occurs to you that his readers are still catching up.

For a fight at Thanksgiving, bring that one up.

Putting religious rights of foster parents above civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. youth, a new executive order reënacts the original sin of the child-welfare system.

Survivors of the whale attack drifted at sea for months, succumbing to starvation, dehydration—and even cannibalism.

The AFL-CIO’s role in weakening left-wing labor unions around the world, between the 1940s and 1990s.

The untold story behind the killings of two Americans by the Chilean military after the coup.

In a militarized territory like Guam, everything is political, even cancer.

How disease devastated populations of escaped slaves in contraband camps behind Union lines during and after the Civil War.

Plath felt that marriage and children were the necessary but insufficient condition of her continued creativity.

How a fringe libertarian belief in monetary collapse inspired a 1970s literature of survivalism.

On Albert Barnes’ massive acquisition of Chaim Soutine's artworks in the early 1900s.

The constitutional ideas in Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet.

The complex justice whose Youngstown concurrence continues to influence debates over executive power.

What the rise of the “Waterpark Capital of the World” means for its namesake riverscape.

In the last years of the 19th century, Jews inspired by the fight for Cuban independence joined the fray.

Handheld calculators saw a massive amount of innovation in the 1970s—thanks in no small part to LCD screens and a primitive form of typography.

On the links between the rise of marriage counseling and the scientific embrace of eugenics.

A short history of the long war on drugs in Latin America from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump.

In the early twentieth century, America's literature seemed provincial until Malcolm Cowley championed writers like Kerouac and Faulkner as distinctly American.

Pecans are a truly American nut: They grew on George Washington’s estate, and they flew to space on an Apollo mission.

How “Philippine mahogany” became America’s tropical timber of choice, thanks to a rebrand from a colonial logging company that drove deforestation.

A train wreck that caused the death of more than a dozen commuters was the impetus behind a monumental project that changed the urban landscape.

Fitzgerald sank in a 1975 storm; Lightfoot’s song made it iconic. The wreck came to symbolize the Midwest’s industrial decline.

The liberal jeremiad warns that democracy is fragile, institutions must be defended, and that vigilance is the price of liberty.

An institutional history of the “peculiar institution.”

There has been a long history of nonviolent resistance in the United States, from William Lloyd Garrison to Martin Luther King Jr.

On the culture wars of the late 1980s and ’90s.

Small wars have been used as a foundation of global order. The belief that limited violence preserves peace serves imperial control.

On the making of one of Hollywood's iconic child characters.

Fifty years later, two iconic photographs of Los Angeles from 1975 contain our present moment.

The Parcae project revolutionized electronic eavesdropping.

A new book doesn’t aim to skewer Jewish defenders of slavery or celebrate Jewish abolitionists, but to understand them, warts and all.