Excerpts

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.

How promises of compensation for Black enlistment helped push Maryland toward ending slavery.

From aluminum to plastic, the evolution of artificial Christmas trees reveal our desires for safer, cleaner, “better” nature and modern convenience.

William Goodell was praised by Frederick Douglass for being among the most important opponents of slavery in his time.

'Blank Space' and 'A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls' examine capitalism and the arts in different eras.

Alexander Hamilton’s treatise on executive power is one of the conservative legal movement’s favorite texts to quote—and misquote.

On the phenomenon of “hiring out” enslaved persons prior to the Civil War, and how this introduced some slaves to the world of wages.

Three experts discuss their behind-the-scenes experience as historical advisers to the new series.

Long before Trump, a group of Dartmouth students weaponized outrage and satire to seize the spotlight.

Historical and even pop culture references to the source of the town's fame are drowned out by a more generic Halloween ambience.

On the legal background to the federal minimum wage, established by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

The chief justice has been working to neuter the Voting Rights Act since the beginning of his career.

From Saint-Simon to Silicon Valley, the urge to forecast the future has always masked a struggle over who gets to define it.

Precious murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and others are even more endangered than we knew.

The Republican Party’s descent into chaos is a product of capitalist fragmentation.

Defeating the Nazi war machine necessitated not just military might, but also skillful diplomacy.

A new book examines Americans' long obsession with the enticing and oppressive concept of entrepreneurship.

Though his writings grappled with the contradiction between bondage and liberty, Thomas Jefferson’s life was indebted to those he enslaved.

How a century of undervaluing women’s labor echoes in policy today.

Black women’s radicalism has been fascism’s enemy for 200 years.

Capitalism is a global economic system, so a proper chronicle of its rise to dominance has to examine the entire world.

A conversation on the wave of landlord perpetrated arson in the Bronx during the 1970s.

The century-long debate over whether parental divorce harms or helps children.

The framers of the United States Constitution envisoned economic discipline that they thought was a requirement for a republic to endure.

History has overlooked the real architect of Joe McCarthy’s purges: his wife.

How mobile and working women managed menstruation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The original doll was not made by Mattel but by a business that perfected its practice making plaster casts of Hitler.

You're misreading Lee Atwater’s infamous “southern strategy” quote as a confession.