Excerpts

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.

Throughout history, the family bomb shelter has reflected the shifting optimism, anxieties, and cynicism of the nuclear age.

What connection does the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have to the party of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?

When Pete Townshend whacked Abbie Hoffman offstage.

Before Bernie Bros vs. the DNC, there was Jesse Jackson vs. the Atari Democrats.

In a sermon two weeks after MLK's funeral, Walker urged young seminarians to be hopeful and take action for making change happen. His sermon has valuable lessons today.

How the dental history of the nation’s first president is interwoven with slavery and privilege.

Alan Berg was an outspoken radio host known for debating people with racist views. His death in a 1984 shooting uncovered a web of white supremacists.

Lisa C. Hickman reconstructs William Faulkner’s tumultuous Hollywood sojourn of 1932–1936.

I live in a place where the wind blows history into my path.

Bernie Sanders is a Democratic Socialist, a potential problem for the presidential candidate. A Cold War campaign to link American-ness and capitalism helped create popular distrust of socialism.

Searching for meaning in the shooters’ infamous “basement tapes.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones' new book sidesteps scholarly critics while quietly deleting previous factual errors.

The Confederate Army required owners to loan their slaves to the military. The National Archives has now digitized those records.

The GE exec was known for his big personality. He should be known for the role he played in creating America's toxic corporate culture on a base of inequality.

How high-fructose corn syrup became an American staple.

Ben Katchor's Brief History of the Dairy Restaurant.

Satire and an inflated sense of self-importance collide in a series of maps that goes back more than 100 years in American history.

The iconic songwriter has transcended time and place for 60 years. What should that mean for the rest of us?

Failing upward with Oliver North.

The dark history of how coffee took over the world.

The counterculture dictum to “turn on, tune in, drop out” did not quite capture Janis’s philosophy to “get it while you can.”

Something unusual happened in New Orleans music around 1895. Was it the birth of the blues?

Today, the holiday is just a chance for ExxonMobil to release nonsensical ad campaigns. But once upon a time, it was a radical success story.

Some recordings in the New York Public Library’s wax cylinder collection haven’t been heard in generations—until now.

The American Midwest was once a site of radical experimentation for various communitarian groups. What has become of their legacy?

This post is part of a symposium on “The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution,” a new book by Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath.

The line from America’s earliest empire in the Philippines to Japan, Korea, Vietnam—and anti-Asian violence at home—is straight, clear, and written in blood.

Historian Daina Ramey Berry's April 2022 congressional testimony on the role of banks and insurers in US slavery.

The filmmaker’s new documentary on Benjamin Franklin tells an old and misleading story.

Three books offer views of the shift from public planning to neoliberal privatization, and emphasize the need to reclaim planning in the public interest.

A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people.

Judith Shklar fled Nazis and Stalinism before discovering in African-American history the dilemma of modern liberalism.

Smokeable pot's proliferation in North America involves the Mexican Revolution, the transatlantic slave trade, and Prohibition.

What began as an attempt to find more job opportunities for historians went further and launched a new field.

About 8,500 women attended the camps inspired by the CCC and organized by Eleanor Roosevelt—but the "She-She-She" program was mocked and eventually abandoned.

It can be hard to know what the Founders intended when they didn't know, either.

The swift, often comfortable ride on the Transcontinental Railroad opened up the American West to new settlement.

Thanks to the efforts of wealthy taxpayers, the "big reveal" of the 1920s was extremely short-lived.

Why did the man known as the “father of Black nationalism” defect to the Democratic Party during Reconstruction?

The first people to view our planet from the moon were transformed by the experience. In this film, they tell their story.

From grade school to college, students of color have suffered from the effects of biased testing.