Excerpts

In an era of laissez-faire governance, a growing number of federal and state regulations were justified as necessary to protect public health and morality.

The humble origins and complex future of cowboy competition.

Read the original article that unearthed the Tuskegee experiment.

The gambit was cynical and disruptive, but in the end it didn’t work.

The piece of paper went missing for nearly 200 years, leaving some scholars to question whether it even existed.

Two new studies ask readers to think expansively about art’s involvement in a broader system of racial capitalism.

At the heart of recent US Supreme Court decisions, the Fourteenth Amendment was framed to require free speech and free elections in the South.

In recent years, Seguin has honored the Texas Rangers with memorials. My father agreed to build one—but then started having second thoughts.

In the 1990s, the New Democrats trusted corporations to do the right thing. The results were disastrous.

A great-great-grandson of Joseph Smith Jr. found the Mormon prophet’s photo tucked inside a locket passed down for generations.

For two centuries, America had kept questions of church and state at bay. The country is not ready for the ones to come.

How Christian conservatives' version of American history shaped the Supreme Court’s abortion and gun decisions.

A letter from the creators of Freedom's Journal to their initial patrons.

It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees, but genetic testing can provide some clues.

All good storytellers tell a big story within a little story, and so do all good historians.

Passage of the ERA seemed like a sure thing. So why did it fail to become law?

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are undermining personal freedom and corroding democracy.

King could not accomplish what philosophers and theologians also failed to—distinguishing moral from immoral law in a polarized society.

Andrew Liptak on the origins of cosplay.

The beginning of the fight for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

While cemeteries are tributes to the dead, they are really about the living. They are about those who want to commemorate something.

Víctor Jara was a legendary Chilean folk singer and political activist whose murder during a U.S.-backed military coup in 1973 went unsolved for decades.

George Kennan's diaries reveal just how much he hated America.

When Ruggles Mine went up for auction, mineral collectors feared it would never reopen to the public. After a last-minute reprieve, its future is still uncertain.

A feminist rant for the ages.

America is best understood not as the first post-colonial republic, but as an expansionist nation built on slavery and native expropriation.

On this episode of BackStory, Brian sits down with Ed to talk about a project of his that’s been twenty-five years in the making.

The centrist, compromising view of reproductive rights in Planned Parenthood v. Casey helped clear the path to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The Supreme Court has found protections for people’s privacy in several constitutional amendments – and used it as a basis for some fundamental protections.

How shall a generation know its story, if it will know no other?

After the 2020 removal of Confederate memorials, museums provide a place to confront the ugly past and find a way forward.

How businesses campaigned to win constitutional rights and expand their political reach.

A first-person account of Fidel Castro during a monumental moment in history.

It took hundreds of years of research to develop in-vitro fertilization or IVF.

In his undelivered final speech, Kennedy warned the world against ‘voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality.’

Clashes between sovereignty rights and civil rights reveal an uncomfortable and complicated story about race and belonging in America.

Representative Mo Udall's ambitious strategy to wean the United States off fossil fuels by the year 2000.

Rural Americans once led the fight to link extreme weather like Hurricane Harvey and human activity. What changed?

Was his disdain for his vice president greater than his desire for Democrats to win?

The Alaska earthquake that put Washington in charge of natural disasters.

World War I exposed the world to the horror of gas attacks. But why do we draw the line there when other methods of killing prove so much more effective?

"I touched the bell and this talk ensued."

July 4th celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but we don’t even have the original!

Queerness has always existed — even on the Civil War battlefield.

The beauty of the atomic scientists' calculations hid from them the truly Faustian contract they scratched their names to.

Presidents of both parties stock their Cabinets with corporate leaders.

Organized movements to bring racial equality to the golf course have been part of the sport since the early 1900s.

Robert Engler's award-winning 1955 investigation into the oil industry.

Why the Green New Deal fits right in with America’s energy economy.

PBS NewsHour coverage of the hot wars of the Cold War.