Excerpts

Benedict Arnold’s boot wouldn’t come off, and other hardships from my weekend in the Revolutionary War.

How he used America’s past to rescue its future.

How a lost copy of the Declaration of Independence unlocked a historical mystery.

Telling the full story of the town’s past is an easy way to make a lot of people mad.

Violence has marred the American constitutional order since the founding. Is it inevitable?

The Founders were inspired—and threatened—by the independence and self-governance of nations like the Iroquois Confederacy.

Thousands of African Americans fought for the British—then fled the United States to avoid a return to enslavement.

Don't let its universalist language fool you.

In the 1970s, corporate America struck back at the forces attempting to rein it in. One of their tactics was a public service announcement.

As some financial leaders fret publicly about the stock market falling to earth, a new book recounts the greatest crash of them all.

James Madison and John Marshall would say Trump’s tariffs are legal.

She lived for 97 years. Only 24 of them were with Alexander Hamilton.

Digging through dictionary archives to uncover the slowly changing meaning of “redskin.”

Tracing Thomas Sowell’s shift from Marxism to the Chicago school of economics.

In trying to shut the door on race-conscious affirmative action, he may have quietly left another affirmative action door wide open.

Unpacking the sensationalist, and occasionally biased, work of Richard Harding Davis.

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball’s white supremacist great-great-grandfather becomes a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery.

Trump’s tariffs/threats have sparked boycotts and motivated voters north of the border, but Canadians’ desire to distance themselves from the US has deep roots

With sumptuous fabric and big shoulder pads, 'King Giorgio' draped us in an outsized identity.

Island Trees v. Pico tested student rights, free expression and the limits of school boards.

Henry’s fiery oratory turned words into revolution, merging faith, emotion, and democracy to help speak a nation into being.

One of the most influential and ardent Patriots couldn’t persuade his son to join the Revolution.

Trump thinks the US was constrained by “political correctness” in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But those wars were characterized by dehumanization and destruction.

He was denounced by rebel propagandists as a tyrant and remembered by Americans as a reactionary dolt. Who was he really?

The question of what Jefferson meant by “all men” has defined American law and politics for too long.

The leading arguments in support of Black voting rights were race-conscious at their core.

Fareed Zakaria blames America’s crisis on “polarization,” but the real issue is asymmetric radicalization: the Right’s anti-democratic turn.

Blaming video games for violence saves Americans from having to grapple with deeper, harder to solve societal problems.

The Congressional Hackathon highlights fading faith in tech fixes and exposes the limits of AI optimism.

The geological origins of the American Revolution.

What happens when Hitler’s shadow fades—and what moral vision replaces it?

The former President once made an offhand remark about Charles Manson’s guilt. The reaction shows how aberrant Donald Trump’s rhetoric is.

Nearly seventy years after its creation, the S&P 500 may be fit for purpose, but it is clearly no longer the narrow one of the 1950s.

The great civil rights leader was suspicious of charisma, and she had something else in mind.

The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century remade how Americans engaged with the world.

What caused the global populist wave? Blame the screens.

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers meant a fugitive's chances of reaching freedom below deck were better than over land.

Trump's NSPM-7 is a pivotal policy endangering free expression in the United States.

Cory Doctorow’s ‘Enshittification’ describes how tech platforms (and everything else) went down the sewer. Hint: It rhymes with ‘deshmegulation.’

After a century of big-government bureaucracy, the U.S. has a developer-in-chief.

The use of the punitive tactic exploded a century after US officials had deemed it too torturous.

The absence of Native perspectives in American history books and classrooms has been remarked on for over 50 years. Will it ever change?

"An account of how chips became a strategically vital resource whose importance is overlooked at our peril.”

To finance the war, the Union had to turn to the banks, and with lasting consequences.

The first maps of the nuclear contamination of the world reinforced our understanding of the entire biosphere as a radically interconnected ecological space.

Sewing for voting in post-Jim Crow Mississippi.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ideas had a profound impact in his time. What would he think of the world we face today?

Across the ideological spectrum, it’s become a bedrock value. What does it mean?

Robert’s Rules shaped 19th-century civic life but were later rejected by 1960s movements, showing shifting ideas of democracy and community.

A new book frames America's gun culture as the consequence of the U.S.'s post-World War II decisions to favor consumerism over safety.