Excerpts

Ken Burns’s "The U.S. and the Holocaust" distorts the historical record in service of a political message.

Lost wars, especially when defeat comes as a rude surprise, inevitably spark painful self-examination.

In 1947, the United States sacrificed for the sake of a starving Europe.

Thoreau-themed goods, designed for mindfulness, are the marketplace’s remedies for a problem which, according to Thoreau, was created by the marketplace itself.

A new book calls white evangelicals to reckon with the fact that the groundwork for their movement was laid, in part, by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI.

Decades before the recent police violence in Memphis, a brutally beaten Latino man was tossed by officers into a Houston bayou and drowned.

The year 2023 marks the centennial of many iconic L.A. landmarks, including the Hollywood sign, Memorial Coliseum, Biltmore Hotel and the Angelus Temple.

Medical schools in the antebellum U.S. were critical in the formation of a medical community that shared ideas about racial science.

Much of what's happening in American race relations traces back to 1966, the year the Black Panthers were formed.

Enslaved conspirators in far-flung Accomack County forced some whites to rethink any legislative efforts aiding Black Virginians.

How the Senate has become a bastion of Republican minority rule.

Palm oil is in everything, but it is also enmeshed in global supply chains that rely on brutal working conditions and the destruction of the planet.

Conservatives have long refused to accept that America’s past is complicated.

Benjamin Prine's descendants didn’t know about their family ties – or their connection to his enslaver.

We may never know with absolute certainty that the Great Fire was an accident, but Grim certainly made it harder for anyone to argue otherwise.

The role of family in Huey P. Newton's educational journey.

The confluence of Black modernity, self-determinism, and belongingness of Harlem's housing.

Sesame Street's most famous origin story centers on a 1966 dinner party. But the program was actually the culmination of a career that began much earlier.

The West is using the wrong analogy for Russia’s invasion—and worsening the outcome.

A sweeping new history weaves personal, intellectual, and spiritual narratives into a book that reminds us of the potential of the socialist movement.

He fell from favor after the disaster of the Iraq War. But he was always biding his time.

During the cold war, football’s violence became precisely its point.

In this case, freaking out makes even less sense because spy balloons are historically a sign of weakness.

Covert U.S. intrusions into Chinese airspace were common for decades.

China’s balloon, whatever its purpose, became a physical and observable reminder of the often-invisible work nations do to keep tabs on one another.

Stephen Casper, a medical historian, argues that the danger of C.T.E. used to be widely acknowledged. How did we unlearn what we once knew?

How Bernardo de Galvez turned the tide against British supremacy on the continent.

Texas’s elite police force has long played the hero in film and television, although the reality is far more complex.

The story of David Ross Locke's travels to Western Europe.

The march toward revolution in America coincided with a smallpox epidemic. True freedom now meant freedom from disease as well.

The historical record reveals the real circumstances that led to the improbable capture of eleven British ships.

Lillian Gilbreth, who died just over fifty years ago, saw that the worker could not be understood as a cog in the machine.

How was the famous prisoner uprising and its aftermath depicted in the prison press? The American Prison Newspapers collection on JSTOR has answers.

The result has been reactionary, often racist intellectual defenses of inequality.

Keaton had been on the stage longest, risen the highest, fallen the furthest, and left the most indelible legacy.

A fatal combination of fear, power, and hubris.

Always a dealmaker, then-senator LBJ negotiated with segregationists to pass a bill that cautiously advanced racial equality.

The NFL's control over entertainment.

We’ve been fighting over gas stoves for decades.

From Underground Railroad conductors who risked everything to present-day residents who show kindness to travelers.

The type of quiet, personal, informed diplomacy advocated by George Kennan can reduce tensions with China and Russia.

Revisiting "When Affirmative Action Was White," nearly two decades on.

Conservatives want to make students patriotic. Instead, they exacerbate historical illiteracy.

The region has been in the disruption business for nearly 150 years.

The government of Guam has appointed a Commission on Decolonization, but U.S. control means that all of the island’s options have substantial downsides.

A glaring portrait of the human cost of law enforcement officers who claim to be above the law.

Remembering the mixed reception is key to understanding the complexities of our history and the persistence of racism today.

A landscape has come into being through a constellation of resistances to these strategies of control.

A helpful way to think about the JFK assassination, and political assassinations more generally, is to be more Dragnet about it than discursive.

How dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.