Excerpts

As liberation movements bloomed, they offered a vision of reproductive justice that was about equality, not just “choice.”

Efforts to roll back abortion and contraception access aim to control women’s sexuality.

In the early twentieth century, dance marathons were an entire industry—and a surprisingly hazardous business.

From origin stories to blood-purity statutes, we have long enlisted genealogy to serve our own purposes.

Laws meant to safeguard great buildings and neighborhoods can also present an obstacle to social progress.

The enduring legacy and capacious vision of Black Reconstruction.

The cruelty of enslavers when it came to reproduction and families shaped the 13th and 14th Amendments.

The bad history in Alito’s draft overturning Roe v. Wade.

The Supreme Court, the federal branch with the least public accountability, has historically sided with tradition over more expansive human rights visions.

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it.

The originalist case for lifting abortion restrictions.

Joan Scott’s "On the Judgment of History" asks us to imagine the past without the idea of progress. But what gets left out in the process?

A scholar of social movements in Iran asks why the US has consistently failed to support that country's activist reform movements.

Did the Confederacy have a constitutional right to secede? And did Lincoln violate the Constitution in forcing them back into the Union and freeing the slaves?

Black midwives were central to community health networks in the South.

Jonathan Goldman explores the beginnings of the Algonquin Round Table and how Parker's determination to speak her mind gave her pride of place within it.

Commemorating the event that hardened the lines of segregation in the city.

A frontier character's life was crafted to be legendary, but was the real person as incredible?

But it remains unfinished.

The long history of concerns about masculinity — and attempts to enhance it.

History suggests the value of a broader understanding of patriotism, one that goes beyond saluting-the-flag loyalty and battlefield bravery.

On the growing tide of racial animosity in 1930s Los Angeles.

The first woman to run for president was infamous in her day.

Religion was no barrier for Southern lynch mobs intent on terror.

Abortion in the 19th century was widely accepted as a means of avoiding the risks of pregnancy.

In the 1960s, a man named Robert E. Simon Jr. dreamed of a city that would be open to all, regardless of race or income: Reston, VA.

More than a century before GoPro, Thomas Stevens’ around-the-world bike ride vaulted first-person “sports porn” into the mainstream.

How an industry responded to the needs of workers and of the federal government during a time of rapid mobilization for wartime production.

American government succeeded, Tocqueville thought, because it didn’t empower the people too much.

Paul Samuelson’s mathematical brilliance changed economics, but it was his popular touch that made him a household name.

Joetha Collier, a young Black woman, was killed by a white man in 1971, near the Mississippi town where Emmett Till was murdered. Why isn’t her case well-known today?

100 years ago, it took a combination of salesman and dictator to launch a historic era for black teams.

How feminists transformed Valium from a wonder drug to a symbol of medical sexism.

Why our politics are growing ever more extreme — and democracy itself is under siege.

An interview with Jesse Tarbert about the history of the American state, “big government,” and the legacy of government reform efforts.

Is the American conception of constitutional rights too absolute?

The fundamentalist movement took the war as an opportunity to rebrand.

In the 1950s, 'coming out' meant quietly acknowledging one's sexual orientation. Today, the term is used by a broad array of social movements.

The author of new book explains the fraught and turbulent relationship between religion and government in the U.S.

The school said it had benefited from slave-generated wealth and practiced racial discrimination.

How cars changed the lives of black Americans.

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin knew the fates of the civil rights and labor movements were intertwined. The same is true today.

Digitization allows researchers to trace editorial and authorial changes in archival content. Both are central to the study of this famous abolitionist pamphlet.

Dreams of Central America in the era of the Erie Canal.

The public widely opposed wiretapping until the 1970s. What changed?

Neo-Nazi propaganda, military deployment and the F.B.I. raid in Waco, Texas, radicalized Timothy McVeigh and led to the Oklahoma City attack.

In "A Nation of Descendants," Francesca Morgan traces the American use and abuse of genealogy from the Daughters of the American Revolution to Roots.

What the president understood that the zealous Republican reformers in Congress didn’t.

When Washington left the presidency, he didn’t really leave politics at all.

Our first President understood that armed citizens are essential to American freedom.