Excerpts

In 1880s Texas, farmers and factory workers discovered they had the same enemy: corporate capitalists.

On daguerreotypes, William Henry Fox Talbot, and darkroom dangers.

Correspondence about writing, travel, and friendship, from 1926 through 1929.

Self-professed defenders of free speech have become the most fervent advocates and agents of government censorship in the twenty-first century.

On the intersection of environmental contamination and violence in the Pacific Northwest.

The psychiatric hospitals promoted by Thomas Story Kirkbride and Dorothea Dix were quickly overcrowded and underfunded — a failure that haunts us today.

The AJC wielded its editorial power to pave the path for Cop City and the 1906 race massacre, directly harming Black Atlantans.

On the abolitionists, Reconstruction, and winning “freedom” from the Right.

With his strange machines and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created a new technique for improving strength and movement.

Despite seeming like strange dance partners, disco and classical make the best music—together.

The unique brutality of the US capitalist class bred a labor movement that has often limited itself to being a private insurance provider.

In the mid-1800s, shady milk purveyors found it was cheaper to keep cows in cities and feed them the byproducts of whiskey manufacturing. The results were dire.

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.

In Ozzy Osbourne's hands, Satan gave a middle finger to hypocrisy and fearmongering.

George Lunn, socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York rose to power in 1911 by making a difference in people's lives.

The 1893 World’s Fair and the origins of Aunt Jemima.

America’s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media.

Over the past several decades, concerns about costs and producing short-term results have narrowed the NIH’s impact.

A roving history makes the case for shade’s centrality to public health, climate adaptation, and even a more robust and inclusive public sphere.

The two-month patrol stopped “suspicious” individuals from crossing into California. But its execution was uneven, and the initiative proved controversial.

Muir Woods National Monument added contextual notes to signs, filling in historical gaps. The Trump administration removed them.

Dishing the African diaspora in Brazil and the United States.

Perhaps the oldest continuously available video game ever made; its history in documents and objects.

Getty Images has released new photos of the Kent State shootings, 49 years after they happened.

How the “obstetrical dilemma” and the dark history of pelvimetry met in the present.

How the March of Dimes used children to raise money for polio research.

From slum clearance to beatnik protests, how Greenwich Village became a battleground over race, art, and redevelopment.

The domestic and international dynamics of the early days of the Civil War.

The rise and fall of Communists in New York’s hotel union reveals how socialists gained, wielded, and ultimately lost power in the U.S. labor movement.

A haunting exploration of “My Old Kentucky Home” reveals how a minstrel song rooted in slavery became a nostalgic American icon embedded in consumer culture.

“Girl on Girl,” by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of the decade’s formative texts.

Knowledge workers, were supposed to be the beneficiaries of neoliberalism and globalization until AI and a hypercompetitive employment market.

In 1872, former slave Mary Virginia Montgomery, now a cotton plantation owner, records her life’s changes after moving from slavery to self-sufficiency.

The agency once projected America’s loftiest ideals. Then it ceded its ambitions to Elon Musk.

On the preparation and aftershocks of the attack that marked the beginning of the Nuclear Age.

Gen. Leslie Groves promoted Oppenheimer as the atomic bomb's inventor to craft a propaganda narrative, obscuring the true creators and moral implications.

JFK's presidential win in 1960 offers a guide for how Democrats can rebound in 2025.

Six decades of civil-rights efforts haven’t budged the racial wealth gap, and the usual prescriptions—including reparations—offer no lasting solutions.

During the American Revolution, some individuals took advantage of the upheaval to advocate for a new colony: New Ireland.

The strange fate of mixed-race families in prisons during World War II.

Colonel Elmer Ellsworth's death marked a turning point in how the nation honored the fallen.

The private boxes for the privileged few in today’s baseball stadiums are nothing new.

On Richard Hofstadter and the current assault on academia.

John Seabrook’s history of Seabrook Farms, where many incarcerated Japanese Americans worked during WWII, is ultimately about fathers and sons.

Thousands of left-wing American Jews have protested Israel. They are taking part in a tradition of anti-Zionist Jewish radicalism.

A new book shows that Marxism in the US "was never constrained to the reiteration of a set of dogmatic principles one associates with party ideologues."

A closer look at the character’s history shows that the latest movie is true to his past.

Jaws is a landmark hit, but also a sharp 1970s film shaped by political ire, social critique, and realist cinema’s lasting influence.

Historian Thomas A. Tweed proposes an environmental approach to the study of American religion.

A new book unearths a chapter of the state’s story when anti-intellectual fundamentalism was put to good ends.