Excerpts

How did the controversial term go from middle-school slang to verboten? The answer lies on the other side of the Atlantic.

A pile of mammoth bones offers evidence that people were living in the region as early as 37,000 years ago.

What shark attacks in 1916 could tell us about the midterms in 2022.

The case for making the street more like the pleasure road Frederick Law Olmsted intended.

How “Vaudeville’s worst act” fought for fame and respect on the stage.

American Democratic Socialism has deep roots in the very “American” values it is accused of undermining.

Abortion and "The Scarlet Letter."

Examining the ingredients—time, grain, government regulations—that have made bourbon an enduring national favorite.

Non-meat proteins have a long history – and are looking more like the necessary food of the future.

The religious origins of American liberalism.

“The circulating medium… is abused like all good things, but without it you would not have had your Horace and Virgil.”

How an intense unclassifiable relationship shaped the history of modern thought.

The two prevailing historical visions of Louis Agassiz — one gentle and reverential, the other rigid and bigoted — may simply be two sides of the same coin.

She was Helen Keller before Helen Keller. Then her mentor abandoned their studies.

Long before the gallery she built was famously robbed, Isabella Stewart Gardner was shocking 19th-century society with her disregard for convention.

On June 15, 1846, Francis Parkman Jr., a young, Harvard-educated historian, arrived at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to begin his journey along the Oregon Trail.

Watergate led to a landmark law designed to limit the influence of money in politics. Today, some say the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal.

Dorothea Dix and Franklin Pierce were in many ways ideological soulmates, but he would not help her effort to improve conditions for the mentally ill.

Why the war started, how the Allies won, and why the world has never been the same.

Poplar—ubiquitous in timber, landscape design, and Indigenous medicines—holds new promise in recuperating damaged ecosystems.

31-year-old Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich took a stand against the sale of his city’s publicly owned electric utility. And he almost paid for it with his life.

Ukraine didn’t become an epicenter of world history all of a sudden; it became an epicenter again.

It has taken decades for an appreciation of Stein’s crime fiction to really take hold.

U.S.-China relations have evolved from tense standoffs to a complex mix of intensifying diplomacy, growing international rivalry, and increasingly intertwined economies.

Is blues music a thing of the past? A festival in Memphis featuring musicians of all ages and nationalities shouts an upbeat answer.

On the relationship between African American music traditions and one of the most infamous slave revolts, the Stono Rebellion, in colonial South Carolina.

Why have historians overlooked the connections between abolitionism and the famous New England cultural movement?

The often forgotten takeover of St. Louis by workers showed that the U.S. isn't immune to Paris Commune–style eruptions of class consciousness.

Two of the earliest films to depict the bombing of Hiroshima show how politics shapes national mourning.

The tendency to favor interest in resource extraction over the protection of the state’s waters, vital to the native Ojibwe population, has deep historical roots.

The regulatory reforms of the railroad and trucking industries are models for evidence-based, bipartisan policymaking.

High unemployment is extremely dangerous.

City planner John B. Williams — and the photographic archive he commissioned — give us the opportunity to complicate received stories of failed urban renewal.

Using records digitized in part by amateur genealogists, economists have upended conventional wisdom about which immigrants succeed and why.

Focusing on a virus’s origins encourages individualized shame while ignoring the broader societal factors that contribute to a disease’s transmission.

In retrospect, it was peculiar but not surprising that the Jewish-American novel peaked early—halfway through the beginning, to be precise.

The legacies of our racial past, and the prospects ahead for an embattled republic.

To many urban Americans in the 1920s, the car and its driver were tyrants that deprived others of their freedom.

Visualizing the legacy of slavery and redlining, 1860 to the present.

Many don’t realize Newport, Rhode Island launched more slave trading voyages than anywhere else in North America.

How right-wing school panics seek to repeal modernity and progress.

On July 1, 1916, a young stockbroker from Philadelphia headed into the surf at Beach Haven, N.J.

In the absence of tax dollars, American cities like Baltimore are now funding themselves by fining the poor instead of taxing the rich.

No longer home to the open-road outlaws and concrete cowboys of the ’70s, becoming a trucker is now the equivalent of operating a sweatshop on wheels thanks to deregulation.

In the modern Olympics’ early days, painters, sculptors, writers and musicians battled for gold, silver and bronze.

The "Christian Amendment" and the push for Christianity to be established as the national religion of the United States.

The rise of popular literature for children put a story, a role model, and a set of values in a young boy’s pocket.

The uses and abuses of history through the "diary" of Thomas Fallon.

The work of three women, in particular, helped pass this landmark legislation.

Despite the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol consumption was an enormous political issue for many white American Protestants.