Excerpts

The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

The Bullock Museum glorifies Texas heroes while treating slavery like an awkward uncle no one wants to talk about.

A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution.

A cautionary tale from the Veterans Health Administration’s troubled past.

Two different accounts from Prospect’s co-founders on how Postwar prosperity gave way to rising inequality, political polarization, and cultural conflict.

Trump and his cronies’ style reflects a platform where grievance is currency and performance is power.

On the groundbreaking work of the Japanese photographer who made Washington state his home.

A new biography examines how 19th-century Americans remembered Mary Ball Washington, who raised the future president on her own after her husband’s death.

Neil Postman's classic "Amusing Ourselves to Death" predicted a dystopian American future.

We must see the world as actors of the past did: through a foggy windshield, not a rearview mirror, facing a future of radical uncertainty.

How the first Women's Studies department was developed at U.C. Berkeley in the 1970s.

What looks like Trump-era economic nationalism has deep roots. German nationalists of the 1800s and fascist leaders of the 1930s imagined power through autarky.

The story of the tempestuous collaboration of Ray Bradbury and John Huston on the production of the 1956 movie “Moby Dick.”

Fara Dabhoiwala’s case against free speech.

Firearm ownership meant something very different when the United States was founded.

Black gold powered the United States’ transition from backwater to global hegemon.

"Apple in China" tells the incredible story of China’s industrial development through the lens of America’s most iconic tech giant.

A Black socialist magazine urges solidarity and action in 1919.

A scorched shoe is a crucial part of Zelda Fitzgerald’s modern mythology. But there’s no proof it existed.

Is he merely a reactionary, or do his films paint a more complicated picture?

Exploring ropemaking, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s wild tale.

Why did the first director of the UN agency think eugenics held the key to a more evolved, harmonious world?

Calls to attenuate the brutality of slavery in museum depictions is absurd when our institutions already downplay one of its most horrific features.

In the early days of flight, airships were hailed as the future of war. Then disaster struck the USS Akron.

The administration is trying to neuter the redistributive and protective arms of the state, while exploiting its bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport.

Lionel Trilling defends humanism amid crisis culture, warning that obsessing over evil can erode the self and our capacity for moral and creative agency.

A Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and colleges should be understood as the culmination of William F. Buckley conservative movement.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope was renamed The Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This telescope is breaking new ground, just as Vera Rubin did in her lifetime.

U.S. housing policy claims to promote homeownership. Instead, it encourages high prices, sprawl, and NIMBYism.

Reporters engage in charm and betrayal; checkers are in the harm-reduction business.

A painting of Gen. Robert E. Lee in his Confederate uniform is back on display at West Point's library.

For decades, health care subsidized research and reputation. Now that model is cracking.

What's up at the NatC Conference.

While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Dorothy Parker is more astute than most on matters of style.

In broadcasting, the Red Scare turned into a stupid hall of mirrors.

Early American elites were fascinated with genealogy, despite the ways it attached them to the Old World.

Both presidents have records as avid deregulators of environmental rules for industry, but Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on science go in a different direction.

Historians say it's good to highlight America's founders, but the project takes too narrow a view of history.

The risk of nuclear war has only grown, yet the public and government officials are increasingly cavalier. Some experts are trying to change that.

The popular musical poses Alexander Hamilton as a symbol of the value of immigrants brought to America, but over time, his party became increasingly xenophobic.

Mamdani’s NYC mayoral rise revives debates over Democratic fusionism, echoing 1890s Populist struggles with establishment power.

One of the most famous episodes of school desegregation was actually just the starting point for a half-century struggle.

Revisit the transformative moment in American culture through the lens of a new book about the 1960s New York avant-garde.

A largely forgotten campaign of harassment and persecution from the 1950s that still echoes today.

Eighty years of talking peace and preparing for nuclear war.

How the Boss provided a 50-year-long soundtrack for the last of the Baby Boomers.

In 1965, Carl Borgmann warned University of Tennessee graduates about CO₂ buildup and climate change, decades before it became a global concern.

Laurence Veysey’s 1965 tome remains the most incisive portrait of higher education.

‘Matcha mania’ shows no signs of slowing, pushing supply chains to the brink. It’s marked quite the rise for a drink long met with skepticism in the West.

The outcome to these three connected events remains ambivalent. Six decades later, many of the issues animating the moratorium remain as relevant as ever.