Excerpts

In Chris Herring’s recent history of the New York basketball team, we get a behind-the-scenes look at the sports commentariat’s fixation on grit and toughness.

The railroad company remains a site for Americans to grapple with key questions about the nature of American capitalism.

A 40-year saga of kickbacks, threats, political maneuvering, and the humiliation of Pearl Jam.

The following piece presents an incomplete timeline of the sociological production of the end of the pandemic over the last year.

One of the key changes—pun intended—to the pop charts in the last 60 years is the demise of key changes. What happened?

Jews from the Ottoman Empire pioneered the Christmas lights market a century ago — but nativism, antisemitism and islamophobia obscured this history.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins invented the setting that eventually became Wakanda in her science fiction, but her name isn't widely known.

A researcher delves into the past to tell the story of a relative—falsely accused as a boy of a crime in Jim Crow–era South Carolina.

When struggling with tax enforcement, rich countries have long tried to shift blame to poor countries.

The grass-covered mounds represent 11,000 years of human history.

Published in 1982, 'The Silver Palate Cookbook' taught a generation of American cooks to trust in bold flavors, fresh herbs, and the joys of improvisation.

On this tiny British outpost, conditions of isolation and alcholism mixed with the era's revolutionary fervor to inspire a number of revolts.

Many early stories praise her work ethic and devotion. But with Mrs. Claus usually hitting the North Pole’s glass ceiling, some writers started to push back.

Alexandra Lange's "Meet Me by the Fountain" recovers the forgotten past and the still hopeful future of the American shopping mall.

Isabella Stewart Gardner builds a place to house her art.

Firestone’s racist system of forced labor made Princeton one of the world’s foremost research universities.

Thousands of free-born Black people in the North were kidnapped into slavery through networks that operated as a form of “Reverse Underground Railroad.”

From Bikram yoga to Tae Bo, the 1990s exploded with exoticized consumer fitness products.

Video testimony and evidence presented by the House Select Committee to recommend criminal prosecution of Donald Trump.

A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government.

The Natchez USCT not only contributed to the war effort but was essential to establishing a post-war monument honoring President Lincoln and emancipation.

Sanctions were conceived as an alternative to war. But they may have made the world more violent.

Was Mississippi John Hurt really the first person to sing the tragic tale of Louis Collins?

The first flu children encounter shapes their immune systems. This had a surprising effect on Black and white mortality rates in 1918.

On the rise and fall of the quintessential ’90s online service provider—and a warning about today’s social-media giants.

Research shows the neighborhood you grow up in has profound impact on your future economic success. How did my family's journey across the country impact me?

The fact that most doctors like me don't know how to perform abortions is one of the greatest scandals of contemporary medicine in the US.

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?

The “forgotten American” mythology of the POW/MIA movement continues to haunt our politics today.

High-stakes testing has struggled with overt and implicit biases. Should it still have a place in modern education?

The history of guest worker programs should give pause to supporters of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act.

The echoes of an airport expansion, completed half a century ago, continue to harm Bostonians' health and well-being today.

Even its inventors didn’t fully understand the point-contact transistor.

Exploring the last 100 years of women in politics through data.

How many rich moderates would join the MAGA far right if redistribution policies threatened their wealth?

First came the politics of right-wing grievance. Then came the new foodie culture. Together, they combined to create one toxic food fight.

Richmond's last major Confederate memorial on city property, a statue of Gen. A.P. Hill, was taken down Monday morning.

An interactive scholarly work that uncovers the history of the Bible in the 19th- and early 20th-century United States.

Denied the free meals of their Irish counterparts, Chinese laborers learned to thrive on their own.

The 11-foot-tall elephant reshaped our language, which has proved surprisingly apt.

Historian Gerald Horne has developed a grand theory of U.S. history as a series of devastating backlashes to progress—right down to the present day.

An overhyped new paradigm proved to be a slogan without a movement.

Race is a social fiction imposed by the powerful on those they wish to control.

A whistleblower says new construction on an old plantation would disrupt important historic sites, including possibly unmarked graves of enslaved people.

At the turn of the century, Mexican American publications paid a price for challenging the local sheriff and elements of the Texas Rangers.

When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the future of affirmative action, I knew I had to be there.

For nearly 50 years, commercial radio companies only employed white broadcasters to target information and entertainment to mainstream America.

From a bus line named Jim Crow to racial violence at public parks, racism shaped Philadelphia. Can we imagine a more equitable city?

People have been drinking eggnog for hundreds of years. Here's where it originated and how it became a traditional holiday drink.

A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War.