Excerpts

Viewed as public memory, the Crisis has an extraordinarily useful function today: a nuclear warning for the future.

Colorblindness has a long history in college admissions, the Black intellectual tradition, and today’s assault on affirmative action and race-conscious policies.

In trying to understand one of the key aspects of structural racism, have we constructed a new moralistic story that obscures more than it illuminates?

On the occasion of its bicentennial, and in the wake of racist violence in Charlottesville, UVA confronts its history.

A discussion of the patriotic attempt to spurn European fashion and spin cloth at home in the time leading up to the Revolutionary War.

How would the presidency have looked under Joseph Lane, a Democrat, as opposed to Abraham Lincoln?

In the 1740s, Bordeaux developed some of the first modern theories of racial difference, even as the city profited from the slave trade.

In the 1930s, Americans fell in love with Czechoslovakia and Spain; today, it’s Ukraine. What happens when one finds a “second mother country”?

Suffragists coalesced in San Francisco to push for nationwide women' suffrage and send a petition to Congress for the vote.

Telling a spooky story around a campfire—or in a dorm room—may be the best way to keep a local legend alive.

Even at a time of repression, these women found ways to create a culture and life for themselves.

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

The Town of Boston’s invention of the standing committee 250 years ago provided a means for building consensus during America’s nascent independence movement.

Two new books make a devastating case against claims that the Constitution should be interpreted on the basis of its purported “original meaning.”

The late socialist writer's first book was a deep exploration of how the US labor movement became so weakened.

What was ethical consumption under capitalism?

In the mid-19th century, a pro-slavery minority used violence to stifle a growing anti-slavery majority, spurring their opposition to respond in kind.

Her private writing offers another, more idiosyncratic angle to understand the famed poet.

In a forbidding Wyoming desert, scientists and fortune hunters search for the surprisingly intact remains of horses and other creatures that lived long ago.

'Pet of the Petticoats' extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres.

Adelaide Hawkins was on the forefront of an American experiment that would later be called central intelligence.

When cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th century, cowboys formed fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range.

Swampland communities established by self-liberated slaves in Louisiana offer a model to cope with climate disruption.

Evangelicalism and the more liberal “mainline” Protestantism must be understood in a dialectical relationship to one another, rather than in isolation.

On the legal challenges to racist presidential policy that led to the Trail of Tears.

The Embarcadero Freeway and the Berlin Wall exemplified how the politics of mobility reflected the arrangements of power in each society.

How our inability to change America’s most important document is deforming our politics and government.

The story of Kate and Margaret Fox, the small-town girls who triggered the 19th century movement known as Spiritualism.

Over the last half-century, economics has infiltrated parts of the federal government where it has no business intruding.

Inside the strife set off by an essay from the president of the American Historical Association.

Inflation hawks and inflation doves alike have learned the wrong lessons from the monetary policies of Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan.

How best to tell the story of oppressed peoples? By chronicling the hardships they’ve faced? Or by highlighting their triumphs over adversity?

Why the history of science is of use to not only the sciences, but all branches of scholarship.

Deferrals for gay men who wish to donate blood are outdated, stigmatizing, unnecessary, and need to be removed.

He sold 60 million books and 100 million records. Then he disappeared.

In the late 1970s, smaller 'Star Wars' action figures took over.

On the persistent myth of the colorblind Constitution that the Supreme Court's conservatives have embraced.

Politicians across the political spectrum warn of a return to the decade of stagflation, urban decay, and labor mutiny; but their solution misses the mark.

It's a tale thousands of years in the making.

Celtic rituals, tricks of nature, and deals with the devil have all played a part in creating this iconic symbol of Halloween.

A new book details the tangled tale of "Ulitsa Sezam," a "Sesame Street" spinoff that aired until visions of Russia's democratic future faltered.

Like so many other reluctant revolutionaries in New York, he seemed the antithesis of the rabble in arms that the British identified with the mobocracy.

The personal essay is the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

Two genetic studies show how the first Native Americans spread through their new continent with incredible speed.

Either way, Rod Serling definitely pissed him off.

Jerry Lee Lewis was known as the Killer, and it wasn’t a casual sobriquet.

Felix Frankfurter was renowned as a liberal lawyer and advocate. Why did he turn out to be such a conservative Supreme Court justice?

The death of Elma Sands and the Manhattan Company.

The outlines of “salvation antiquarianism”—with the emphasis on “saving”—appears particularly clearly in the AAS’s inaugural 1813 address.

Ballot initiatives, referendums, and other forms of direct democracy have a mixed track record of empowering the people.