Excerpts

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.

The burden welfare policies place on eligibility technicians.

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.

In the early 1980s Tucson, activists and religious leaders joined forces to protect refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border, galvanizing the Sanctuary Movement.

After years of delays, construction is set to begin on the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial.

The “Jewish Question” is a scapegoating conspiracy. This essay traces its appeal, partial truths, and why it falsely absolves America of blame.

A myth and its legacy.

Why jury size matters.

In April 1962, Pete Seeger was abruptly banned from performing a scheduled set for children in Pittsburgh. The surrounding debate says a lot about the city.

The important moral and tactical contributions of African-American soldiers in the Union Army.

What winter was like before the stove revolution, and the tension between comfort and family values.

The Declaration drew on Enlightenment ideas to assert equality, justify independence, and inspire lasting debates over rights and slavery.

The documentary depicts the kind of maverick journalism we desperately need in our authoritarian times.

Jeffrey Epstein helped Leslie Wexner repurpose the CIA’s Iran–Contra planes from arms smuggling to shipping lingerie.

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.