Excerpts

A discipline born from the study of the Holocaust faces its contradictions as Israel stands accused of the “crime of crimes.”

When McCarthy stalked the groves of academe.

Red Scare can be read as solid history of the years it depicts—and chilling prophecy of the years to come.

How Claire McCardell changed women’s fashion.

During the Reagan revolution, Democrats settled on a new way to win—and it’s destroying them now.

The torturers have been revising, the gestapos have been busy, and the prisons have been full for generations.

This opinion is a milestone in the rule of law and is regularly cited by conservative and liberal justices alike.

Jimmy Swaggart utilized his charisma to overcome not one, but two sex scandals.

At the turn of the century in upstate New York, one tiny town learned there was money to make in the jailing of Chinese migrants.

He believes in Federalist 70’s “Energy in the Executive.”

'Inherit the Wind' changed how people understand, and remember, the legendary Scopes trial.

Trump is only the latest to embrace a costly and immoral tactic.

Jails have been foundational to immigration enforcement for over a century—and have always operated with a staggering absence of oversight and public awareness.

The poem that became a hymn to the nation came about in troubled, polarizing times.

Two stories from the 19th century about government records being falsified to foment distrust of nonwhite Americans.

How Joseph Kurihara lost his faith in America.

Long before the new detention facility in Florida, the reptile has featured in the fantasies of Southern racists.

A dark mystery shocked America in the early 1990s, from prime-time shows to Congress. It’s largely been forgotten. It shouldn’t be.

Truths self-evident no more.

So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores?

Signed into law 90 years ago, labor’s onetime ‘magna carta’ is now a very dead letter.

For a brief window at the end of the Cold War, British alt-rock band Jesus Jones tapped into global feelings of optimism and hope.

On the long history of governments attempting to restrict access to documents about their inner workings.

The semaphore towers of the Hudson.

On memory, erasure, and the return of indigenous presence.

A new book offers a fresh perspective on the resistance of enslaved women and their interactions with the law.

Toni Morrison was an editor for 12 years, even as she wrote her own masterpieces. I spoke to her authors about being edited by an icon.

Donald Trump recently deployed California’s National Guard to repress protests in LA. The National Guard has a long history of breaking up protests and strikes.

Revisiting history shows that violence and constitutional disputes are nothing new in US politics.

How 13 colonies came together.

This facility’s purpose fits the classic model, and its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.

A new book examines the aggressive masculinity that the editors of the Partisan Review brought to their art and literary criticism.

The Declaration of Independence condemns King George III. But the British were not to blame for one of the war’s most infamous conflagrations.

The recent resettlement of a few dozen Afrikaner “refugees” points to a longer history of U.S. fascination with these Dutch-descended white South Africans.

Why does the diagnosis of Gage social ‘disinhibition’ lean so heavily on flimsy documentation about Gage, while overlooking the case of Eadweard Muybridge?

Trump’s threats to take control of the Panama Canal have precipitated a struggle over the country’s sovereignty.

An enslaved woman’s refusal to name her child challenged Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition laws and left behind a rare archival trace of resistance.

It depends on how you read the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths.

If we imagine religion as a technology, argues Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, we can better see the cause of its decline: obsolescence.

ICE officers are wearing masks to conceal their identities. The Ku Klux Klan also employed masks to avoid prosecution for its acts of racial violence.

Myths are fed back as stereotypes and strawmen to divine some boundary for acceptability.

The idea that birth on U.S. soil confers citizenship has remained both foundational and contested.

It’s uncanny.

The disgraced televangelist built his career on an undeniable talent. His downfall contributed to a major shift in how Americans viewed religious leaders.

How did libertarians come to embrace Henry George, a thinker championed by political coalitions ranging from early zionists to the global Green Party?

U.S.-Iran diplomacy, intelligence on South Korea's nuclear program, and fears that a reactor given to India would become a “do-it-yourself bomb kit.”

California has long allowed an ambiguous boundary between public and private land along its coast. Climate change is testing the limits of this compromise.

How the novelist turned the violence and randomness of war into a cosmic joke.

Films about the Iraq War prize “truth-telling,” but don’t offer many insights about the war itself.

The author of "Homeplace" shares a note from Patsy Cline.