Excerpts

Trump's foreign policy is not as unprecedented as it seems.

It started as a trade secret. Then it became an icon.

The third president knew that the whims of nature shaped Americans’ daily lives as farmers and enslavers.

"I pledge to laugh / At the Flag / Of the United States of America..."

In the 1970s, a crop of books purporting to provide a scientific basis for gender inequality met sharp criticism from figures like Gould.

On John Huggins, Angela Y. Davis, and the complex history of an oft-misunderstood political movement.

In the late ’70s, a pro women’s hoops team briefly captivated the city by living up to its name. Then it all unraveled.

The life of John Andrew Jackson — and the vacillating richness and scarcity of the archive.

On Barbara Lee and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Osgood Carleton and his forgotten 1795 map of Boston.

On October 6, 1923, Iowa State tackle Jack Trice lined up for the second half of a college football game. No one’s sure what happened in that third quarter.

Michael Boskin’s volume gives a grim account of the state of federalism today.

Headlines tell us that the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have both opened a new chapter of populist politics. How is that possible?

Today, the international feminist group FEMEN uses nudity as part of its protests. But appearing naked in public was also a tactic used by early dissenters.

White supremacy and the birth of the modern Democratic Party.

Italian immigrants had no qualms about working and living alongside Black Americans, which made them targets for violence by white vigilantes in Louisiana.

In the 1970s board games joined TV, film, books, and other media in exploring the state of the environment.

How scholars achieved some of the most consequential intelligence victories of the twentieth century.

On the ongoing legal struggle for educational and racial equality across the United States.

In the 1970s, a conservative coalition came together to fight ceding control of the Panama Canal—proving the political potency of the issue.

And is probably still at it. As newly released classified documents confirm activists’ long-held suspicions, the disclosures should also alert us to current dangers.

Theodore Roosevelt started a version of DOGE too, but it failed to achieve much.

A new documentary photography project grapples with manifestations of a problematic past resurfacing in present-day Alabama.

In trying to freeze reality into a cudgel that can be used to assault political opponents, the New Atheists deny the observable evidence in front of them.

When Barney's is selling Black Sabbath shirts for $175, does it change the cultural credibility of your favorite vintage band tee?

Some historians think Benedict Arnold's treason may well have aided the American cause in the Revolutionary War.

Digital archive and interactive map that tells the story of U.S. government institutions through the lives and work of federal employees.

Jonathan Gienapp's attack on originalism deserves a serious response.

On civilians’ opinion of killing civilians by air during World War II.

Reagan’s capacity to inhabit and generate legend stemmed from his own impulse to substitute pleasing fictions for inconvenient facts.

The worship of military technocrats underwrites American failures abroad.

In the late 1960s, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, jazz legends were playing the best music you’ve never heard.

Countries have also used their postal systems to fight back against aggression.

On the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago.

Long before Trump expressed interest in a name change, conquerors have battled to claim the wealth of its rich waters.

The tale of how and why Russia ceded its control over Alaska to the U.S. 150 years ago is actually two tales and two intertwining histories.

The push for a national Martin Luther King holiday prompted a fierce political tug-of-war, on campus and off.

If ordinary Americans know one critic of the American Empire, it’s almost certainly Chomsky.

Her long-unpublished novel was the culmination of a years-long fascination. What does it reveal about her fraught views on civil rights?

Today’s legislative efforts against the Palestine solidarity movement bear a striking resemblance to McCarthyism in both tactics and ideology.

In 1964, Harper Lee talked with WQXR host Roy Newquist for an interview in New York.

Jane Addams and the interwar women’s peace movement: feminist contributions to international relations.

Throughout its history, the vast Arctic island has been viewed by competing powers as a strategic prize and geopolitical asset.

Anita Bryant’s legacy is not what she hoped—but her destructive message lives on.

How a lively market on Boston Harbor became part of many defining moments of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras.

In the 1920s, many in the U.S. fought for a living Constitution. Plenty of others wanted it dead.

The U.S. faces the likelihood of a bruising and raucous set of confirmation hearings — a clear break from the cooperative system the founders established.

The origins of the Electoral College are entwined with slavery, but not in the way that recent accounts have suggested.

The abusive experiments on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School were only one part of a much larger unethical research program.

Were the Knights of the Golden Circle responsible for Lincoln’s assassination? No one knows, but far-right secret societies always draw power from speculation.