Excerpts

There is an undeniable symmetry between surges in drug use in the US and the country’s covert operations overseas.

The National Park Service safeguards artifacts from theft and trails from erosion. It should protect public truth with the same seriousness.

Once upon a brief time, there was consensus around social progress. But the backlash began almost immediately—and has been with us ever since.

David McCullough helps readers understand why it's worth remembering the past.

A new book features Bayard Rustin's essays and contemporary reflections on what today's Left can learn from his work.

Our infrastructure showed its age and its vulnerabilities when the lights went out.

Most important is the path pursued by my mother. She sustained herself by engaging socially, rather than battling politically or withdrawing stoically.

The Superbowl LX halftime show tapped into a 200-year old tradition of elevating hemisphere over nation in the struggle against imperial rule.

On the unsung contributions of Black and indigenous people to American biology.

America continues to grapple with the legacy of one of its favorite Founders.

The role of tabloid journalism in shaping the racist narrative of the 1984 Bernie Goetz subway shooting.

How maps, scarcity, and severe weather combined to shape the new American Republic—and a revolution we’re still waiting on.

How the Lowell mill working girls are being remembered in Trump's America.

Today’s anti-environmentalists are following the tracks of the ‘Phantom Duck’ and the Barstow-to-Vegas race.

In the 1960s, the Auto Pact deal integrated the US and Canada’s auto sectors. Donald Trump’s trade war will all but guarantee its unraveling.

The National Park Service has erased her story from Philadelphia exhibit.

The pillars aren’t new. They were built over decades, with bipartisan consensus.

The meaning of “revolution” has shifted between feared upheaval and hopeful progress, and its promises often bring violence and mixed results.

How Fiorello La Guardia and a popular front of radicals and reformers transformed New York City.

The fundamental problem of the present is complicity.

It should not be controversial to acknowledge the hideous injustice done to Native Americans through colonization.

Powerful organizations during the Red Scares crafted a world where “academic freedom” was conditional on political allegiance.

What is “the process” for taking down Confederate statues? There isn’t one.

The Founding Father desired to be remembered by history.

Once upon a time, a group of 600 young adults smiled as one, danced in pastel outfits and sang about positivity during the Super Bowl halftime show.

A brief history of Pittsburgh’s first fair housing law.

The long history of Black heroism and service—and the current efforts to erase it.

Invoking the memory of Jewish persecution to denounce the assault on immigrants today is not an offense but a moral imperative.

An examination of Alex Pretti’s killing by ICE to challenge the idea that the Second Amendment safeguards liberty and deters government tyranny.

His joyous, internationalist, worker-centered vision was a declaration of war against Trumpism.

How the cruelty of the Confederacy’s prison camps gave rise to the rules of war.

Our reticence to name the civic occasion we are marking this year points to a deeper uncertainty about how to relate to American history.

Chronicling the history behind the famous photograph.

With nearly all of the victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre now dead, the country must find other ways to rectify its wrongs.

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters launched a union drive against a railroad giant, forever entwining the causes of labor and black civil rights.

Victorians found a way to anonymously tell people they didn’t like exactly how they felt.

Matthew Pinsker reveals how the 16th president carefully built a partisan base essential to his rise.

The health of a nation reflects the health of a democracy.

In 1912, Kansas City became the first U.S. city to arrest jaywalkers. Pushed by industry propaganda, it helped shift streets toward cars, not people.

On the adolescent aesthetics that the federal government is co-opting to promote ICE.

Discussion of how liquor licensing has shaped Black economic opportunity and equity from antebellum oyster cellars to modern Boston.

The American Legion at home and abroad.

There is little historical information about Dr. Griggs, but what little there is, is significant.

Politics keeps refighting the Founding: Amar says liberals inherit originalism, but that tale smooths 19th-century contradictions.

From McCune Smith to Du Bois, Black scholars used data to debunk scientific racism and prove health inequality was social, not biological.

Discussing effective historical analogies for the second Trump administration.

My grandmother lived in Kew Gardens, Queens. It was just an average New York commute, but for me it meant stepping out of one reality and into another.

How do we celebrate America's 250th anniversary as ICE and the Border Patrol threaten and abuse ordinary Americans?

Far from the bastion of secularism many people today assume it to be, the landmark abortion ruling enacted the values of liberal mainline Protestantism.

From Syria to Lebanon to Gaza, the coercion central to the new regime has been incubated in the Middle East.