Excerpts

In a covenantal nation like the United States, words are the very ligaments that hold the body together, and what words we choose become everything.

In 1970, an all-white state commission thought Mississippi was "not yet ready" to see a racially integration depicted on television. The backlash was swift.

The rise of the right-wing paranoid fantasy, egged on by Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, reflects deep currents in American politics.

As the 20th century’s preeminent scholar-activist on race, W.E.B. Du Bois would not be surprised by modern-day attempts at whitewashing American history.

Japan sent nearly 10,000 bomb-bearing balloons toward the U.S. during World War II. One killed six people.

What the differences between Hiram Fong and Nikki Haley tell us about changes to the GOP.

Immigrant housewives and the riots that shook New York City.

The president's Nantucket nuclear fallout shelter could become a National Historic Landmark—but efforts to preserve its history have stalled.

How modern songwriting evolved into a game of aggressive credit—even for the people who didn’t technically do the composing.

The crusade against civil liberties during World War I.

From Stanford to Silicon Valley, a small town in California spread tech’s gospel of data and control.

An interactive chart reveals how the words presidents use reflect the twists and turns of American history.

The state wants to severely limit what professors can say in the classroom.

Conservatives and the GOP have mounted a decadeslong legal fight to turn the clock back on the political gains of the civil rights movement.

A feud between two nineteenth-century German-language newspapers showed that immigrant communities embraced a diversity of interests and beliefs.

The story of George Jackson and his radical politics that challenged the American Government in an age of political repression.

Freedom Summer in the segregationist heart of the Deep South.

The retail giant’s mail-order business reigned supreme for more than a century, offering everything from quack cures to ready-to-build homes.

Louis Fatio seized an opportunity to recount his version of his life—a story that had been distorted and used by white Americans for various political purposes.

With bar graphs and pie charts, the sociologist and his Atlanta students demonstrated Black excellence in the face of widespread discrimination.

Although the exhibit closed in 1992, the Dickson Mounds Museum is still grappling with its legacy.

Plants and settlers take root in a new mythology of Arizona.

The story of Swami Vivekananda and his time in America.

Native editors are fighting back.

Distortions in Western history have long obscured the region’s Black communities.

Reversing the rising tide of femicide requires understanding its deep roots in the United States.

A relic of '80s scofflaw gun culture is still lethal.

How the Caribbean colony contributed to America's fight for independence.

A chatbot billed as an educational tool falsely portrays historical figures, including dictators and Nazis, as apologetic for their crimes.

Americans disparaged the British as arsonists. But the rebels fought with fire too.

U.S.-Iranian relations, the interrelationship between Iranian development and the global oil market, and the future of economic warfare.

On Sept. 30, 1968, the first Boeing 747 rolled off the assembly line. Some 55 years later, the last one has left its factory.

Alec Nevala-Lee’s new biography assesses the complicated legacy of an architect better known for his image than his work.

A century ago, it was once motivated by the goal of economic reorganization.

After Robert Opel dashed naked across the stage in 1974, he ran for President and settled into the gay leather scene.

Historians must read every imperfect archive with a particular perspicacity, to uncover the histories so many archives were meant to suppress or erase.

Although freed from slavery, Louis Congo's job as public executioner ensured him a life as a pawn of French officials and retaliation from those he disciplined.

Understanding puzzles as agents of disorder runs counter to a common interpretation that associates puzzles with the quest for order.

University faculty nationwide rebuke Ron DeSantis's recent decision to ban the course from Florida schools.

Christopher Rufo's polemical attacks against Critical Race Theory are not a new phenomenon. Public schools have long been a battlefield for ideological warfare.

Melvyn Leffler’s book on the roots of the Iraq invasion demonstrates the pitfalls of excessive trust in one’s sources, especially when they're top policymakers.

Militia groups have long used Waco as a rallying cry. But it was never the example of whiteness under siege that they invoke.

The untold story of the private equity investors behind Mifeprex—and their escalating legal battle to cash in post-Dobbs.

Instead of using the Underground Railroad as a route north, thousands of enslaved Black people fled to communities in the South.

Lee's life and work suggested that Asian American identity did not possess—and did not need—any underlying reality beyond solidarity.

Hyperindividualism has infiltrated our economic, social, and political landscape.

How the Supreme Court has weaponized the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education against antiracism.

Ambition, insecurity, and the perils of independence.

In the late 19th century, Wells connected lynchings to the economic interests and status anxieties of white southerners.

First-person accounts of those scarred in many ways by the era’s violence suggest Reconstruction did not fail, it was overthrown by violence.