Excerpts

Few who encounter Positive Psychology via self-help books and therapy know that its gender politics valorize the nuclear family and heterosexual monogamy.

Traditional Supreme Court precedent may depend too much on substantive due process to safeguard human rights.

What happens when forged documents enter the historical record?

In a novelized biography of Samuel Sewell, a greater mystery than what bedeviled the girls is what motivated a righteous man to condemn them for witchcraft.

President Ford’s unconditional pardon of Richard Nixon created political controversy. It also tarnished Ford’s own reputation with the American public.

By documenting how public debt produced our present nightmare, Destin Jenkins allows us to dream about using public money to mend the ills of our era.

In September 1868, Southern white Democrats hunted down around 200 African-Americans in an effort to suppress voter turnout.

Rock music owes much of its claim to coolness to the Christian faith.

A visual record of the largest aerial bombardment in history.

A conversation about changing the American story.

In the 1930s, 16 African-American families from the South rejected the American experiment and looked to Communist Uzbekistan for a chance to build a new world.

In 1931, an entire new cast and crew reshot Dracula in Spanish on the Universal Studios lot.

What kind of place was the town I grew up in?

Without a name for it, figuring out why it happened is that much harder.

The history of "proving", the practice of auto-experimentation that forms the cornerstone of homeopathic medicine.

There’s no country that more clearly illustrates the confusing nexus of Hillary Clinton’s State Department and Bill Clinton’s foundation than Haiti.

Nearly two decades ago, historians embraced a hugely wasteful federal education program. It’s past time to reckon with that.

A discussion of the booming 19th-century trade in scrap metal.

If you have no idea which wave of feminism we’re in right now, read this.

The papers of American labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) offer a snapshot of early twentieth-century politics.

When James G. Blaine went to war with his son's ex-wife in the national press, he had no idea that two could play that game.

A new documentary tells the story of the last known slave ship to enter the United States and takes on the difficult question of how to memorialize America’s history of racial violence.

The B-52’s prolific service career spans not only decades and conflicts, but eras of aviation.

This collection of piracy trials comprises documents that were published before 1923 and that are part of the holdings of the Law Library of Congress.

How should we interpret the United States Constitution?

Lyndon B. Johnson's visionary set of legislation turns 50 years old.

Philadelphia and the dark history of collecting human remains.

The world is still reeling from the pandemic, but another scourge we thought we’d eliminated has reemerged.

“Colorblindness,” an ideology that denies race as an organizing principle of the nation’s structural order, reaches back to the drafting of the US Constitution.

The early history of rating credit in America.

Walter Lippmann’s seminal work identified a fundamental problem for modern democratic society that remains as pressing—and intractable—as ever.

Charlie Rich, the tragic soul man whose legacy was largely forgotten after his brief period of fame.

In 1967, I was in the middle of one of the world’s buzziest stories.

After an African-American cemetery was bulldozed, families wondered what happened to the graves.

Is this the end of the Voting Rights Act?

In 1920, my American-born great-grandmother, Ida Brown, married a Russian immigrant in New York City.

Contrary to popular belief, the South has always been the key to defining the promise and limits of American democracy.

Hurricane Fiona hit the island as only a Category 1 storm. But thanks to bad management, the electrical grid immediately collapsed.

Beginning in 1967, the Army built fake towns to train police and military officers in counterinsurgency.

Among the thousands of cases the Supreme Court has decided, only a handful of dissenting opinions stand out.

Back when monarchs had much more power—and news was far from instantaneous—it had major implications in the American colonies.

George Washington scales new heights.

Companies across the South profited off the forced labor of people in prison after the Civil War – a racist system known as convict leasing.

The story of a regional ruling class that struck a devil’s bargain with disease, going beyond negligence to cultivate semi-annual yellow fever epidemics.

A trio of American Samoan plaintiffs are asking the high court to end their status as second-class citizens.

Lincoln's wartime governance had dire, and longstanding, economic consequences.

Looking back on "American Gigolo," a love story about a wardrobe.

Hood and Sherman exchange epistolary fire in 1864.

Why a policy agenda adopted in the name of entrepreneurs hurt entrepreneurs more than it helped them.

“That spirit of community, which we all talk about as the roots of hip-hop, really originates in that block party concept.”