Excerpts

During the Civil War, the Lincoln administration demonstrated that a progressive agenda and effective anti-inflationary measures could overlap.

The carefully-tended longleaf pine forests of North America were plundered by European colonizers. They're still recovering.

The conservative successes of the Eisenhower administration have been too quickly forgotten.

Thanks to a collector, thousands of lobby cards from the silent film era will soon be digitized.

The Pentagon's official history says that a heavy bombardment by B-52s in 1972 pushed the North Vietnamese to return to negotiated peace. What are the facts?

A new book offers a picture of an early Internet defined by community, experimentation, and lack of privacy. 

The bank’s history highlights flaws in using public-private partnerships to address racial inequality.

On “all wars” memorials.

How new arrivals remade the east San Gabriel Valley — and assimilated in it.

Despite the prevalence of tricks and spooky spirits in earlier years, the American commercial holiday didn’t develop until the middle of the twentieth century.

Are alarmist narratives about a “new civil war” obscuring the real battle in US politics: the fight for democracy?

When a climate of fear exists, people don’t scrutinize the evidence behind claims about children’s reading material.

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.

The famous historian makes the claim that the demigods of American historical mythology can help us carve paths through our forbidding 21st-century wilderness.

Today’s creepy clowns are not a divergence from tradition, but a return to it.

The Supreme Court considers new arguments challenging admissions practices that colleges use to select a diverse student body.

The common picture we get of the US South is one of resolute conservatism. But the region has a radical history, too.

Rather than a “colonial America,” we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial.

Is the working class experiencing a new CIO moment?

Beginning in the 1960s, young Black majorettes and dance troupes created a fascinating culture. This is the story of how they did it.

An admission of wrongdoing from the U.S. government came later, but a Supreme Court ruling had lasting impact.

A missed opportunity for genuine equity.

A virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news, he had a sense of political theatre that helped create a radical new reality.

Railroads—in the Jim Crow South just as in today’s Ukraine—employ physical infrastructure to create racial divisions.

In search of the mythical blues—and their real urban origins.

An excerpt from a new book on the so-called "Jewish Kennedys."

Just before a lynch mob was to face trial in Florida in 1926, a storm hit.

The missile crisis led Cuba’s leaders to distrust their Soviet ally—an attitude that ultimately helped their revolutionary system to outlast the USSR’s.

Saidiya Hartman’s unrelenting exploration of slavery and freedom in the United States first appeared in 1997 and has lost none of its relevance.

A new book documents a period of thriving radical groups and their devastating suppression.

How marketing made guns a fundamental element of contemporary boyhood.

A new documentary explores the origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott — with lessons on how we see movements.

When a university denied its legacy, students and faculty stepped in to do the research.

Conservative Judaism’s origins lie in a donor plan to neutralize and refine the radical Jewish immigrant masses.

Group sues Biden and National Archives over delay of JFK assassination records.

A review of "C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian."

The author confronts the daunting task of writing about her childhood memory, both as a memoirist and a historian.

The Broadway revival of the musical means less to reanimate the nation’s founding than to talk back to it.

One of the earliest uses of intertitles, in this fin-de-siècle accident picture we can observe cinema discovering new forms of communication.

Looking back at the misadventures of mid-century whale cardiology expeditions.

To understand today’s political battles, you need to know how they began.

The promise of US federalism is that states will be “laboratories of democracy." The reality is that states are more often laboratories of authoritarianism.

To what extent did newspapers influence public opinion in the US and Britain before and during World War II?

Forty-one of the 561 enslaved Africans on board the "Guerrero" died when the illegal slave ship sank off the Florida Keys in 1827.

How the defeat of the 1890 Lodge bill presaged today’s age of ballot-driven backlash.

A show at the Jewish Museum surveys three eventful years of art, film, and performance in New York City—and the political upheavals that defined them.

Describing the experiences of radicals who lived in, traveled to, or found themselves in Mexico between 1910 and 1920.

Where did the behind-closed-doors racist garbage from some leading Los Angeles elected officials come from?

Without Murray’s intense commitment to the freedom struggle, the more famous civil rights leaders would not have had the successes they did.

Charles Sherrod wasn’t a big name, but his life has a lot to tell us about the civil rights movement.