Excerpts

Fire is a planetary feature, not a biotic bug. What can we learn from Yosemite’s experiment to restore natural fire?

Thoreau's time at Walden Pond has provided substantial data for scientists monitoring the effects of a warming climate on the area's plant life.

Her narrative documents the very real dangers enslaved runaways experienced while traveling through so-called "free states" of the North.

The newly conservative court may target the decision that allows for a minimum wage.

Josh Hawley’s attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are part of a long, sad tradition.

Thomas Jefferson was a proponent of open migration. But who qualified as a refugee?

Bostonians refused to be forced to house British soldiers. So the army paid rent to willing landlords, and soldiers’ families settled down all over town.

The story of America’s most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth.

You can hear it in your head: the grunt your character makes when hopping a fence or leaping into battle. Its sonic roots trace all the way back to 1973.

One focus of the 1960s struggle for civil rights in the North were the construction industries of Philadelphia, New York and Cleveland.

A new book tells the scandalous secrets of a forgotten 19th-century tycoon, Miriam Follin Peacock Squier Leslie Wilde, also known as Mrs. Frank Leslie.

In the 1920s, the public hated cars. So the auto industry fought back — with language.

Barbara Ann Richards designed—and then demanded—the life she deserved.

Ukraine’s wartime communications strategies have roots in World War II.

Why abolitionist Lydia Maria Child raged at President Lincoln’s political calculations.

The attacks on CRT have terrified our educators. But the public school system has always made it hard to teach controversial subjects.

For many Crockettes, the job was glamorous, fulfilling, and "almost subversive."

Balding has been the constant scourge of man since the beginning of time, and for millennia, our best solution was the comb-over.

The Nation of Islam is controversial. Its practical purposes for incarcerated people transcend both politics and religion.

Research on psychedelics has been riddled with medical racism and exclusion but it hasn’t stopped Black people from finding creativity and solace through drugs.

Why we should resist hero-worshipping Ukraine’s president.

Historian Daryl Scott weighs in on the 1619 Project and the "possibility that we rend ourselves on the question of race."

DNA tests have become popular tools to rediscover lost ties to the past, but the links they forge do not always stand up to historical scrutiny.

A new book explains why Americans know so little about other countries.

Historian Robin Einhorn reflects on Americans’ complicated relationship to taxes, from the colonial period through the Civil War to the tax revolts of the 1980s.

In the 1970s, NOW began to ask hard questions about the women who were no longer "homemakers", displaced from the only role they were thought to need.

On heavy metal’s fascination with Roman emperors.

Laws controlling what schools teach about race and gender show an awareness that classrooms are sites of nation-building.

The entire plot of Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire turns around getting people on the phone.

The far-right protestors in Huntington Beach aren’t as novel as they seem.

For American journalists abroad in the interwar period, it paid to have enthusiasm, openness, and curiosity, but not necessarily a world view.

Video game history is lost faster than we can preserve it.

The National Black Political Convention of 1972 saw many national giants on the Black political scene.

Rupert Russell’s new book shows how the financialization of commodity prices worsens volatility and destabilizes geopolitics. It couldn’t be more timely.

Markoff’s biography of Stewart Brand notes that Brand’s ability to recognize and cleave to power explains a great deal of his career.

A single reference in the historical record has spawned an array of adaptations, most of which overstate the anonymous figure's role in the Culper Spy Ring.

A few decades ago, the left and the right, politicians and the public, universally embraced the criminalization of drug use. But a new consensus has emerged.

Basic healthcare in the 20th Century greatly impacted the way that the drug business currently operates in the United States.

Prisons have been controversial since their beginnings in the late 1700s — why do they keep failing to live up to expectations?

"The American Scene" is Henry James’s indictment of what Americans had made of their land.

A review of three new books that in various ways track the rise of the "Professional Managerial Class."

How American racism, capitalism, and imperialism led the U.S. to sabotage African democracies.

Hal Brands urges the U.S. to make China and Russia “pay exorbitantly” for their policies. History shows that has never worked.

The defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 changed the way justices are confirmed today.

It’s never been easier to piece together a family tree. But what if it brings uncomfortable facts to light?

On who gets caught in the crosshairs when it comes to “beef."

A cautionary tale about the costs and benefits of public/private partnerships.

The Solomon Sir Jones films consist of 29 silent black and white films documenting African-American communities in Oklahoma from 1924 to 1928.

The Coloured Hockey League doesn’t get a prominent place in most tellings of hockey’s story, but its legacy is undeniable.

How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance.