Excerpts

The history of the left in the United States is a history of betrayal.

The history of the movement is one of unlikely success. But what can we learn from embattled experiments like prescribed heroin? 

The language sustained a Jewish diasporan secular culture. Today, that heritage survives in a gritty corner of Queens to be claimed by a new generation.

Roscoe Conkling was a successful politician and an able lawyer. But the colorful and irascible senator had no desire to serve on the high court.

The Great Migration in the 20th century changed the face of America. For the past few decades, it's been reversing.

Brothel guides tended to be small, making them easy to conceal. They also mimicked other publications to make it easier to hide the guides’ true purpose.

Six days after 9/11, the FBI raided a Detroit sleeper cell. But, despite a celebrated conviction, there was one problem — they’d gotten it wrong.

The idea of liberty has often seemed to mean freedom from government and its spending. But there is an alternate history, one just as foundational and defining.

Jackalopes have migrated from Wyoming across the nation, but what’s really known about the mythical creature?

A woman who repeatedly challenged racial violence and the prejudiced systems protecting its perpetrators.

In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, the victory of racial prejudice over democratic principle and the rule of law was unnervingly complete.

Driven by fears of the rise of communism, the U.S. intervened in elections across the globe. In Latin America, the consequences are still being felt.

A look back at the early years of the 350-year-old institution that once claimed a vast portion of the globe.

The Kent State shootings further widened the chasm among a citizenry divided over the Vietnam War.

Though some have likened it to Sodom and Gomorrah, New York City has a long history of religious vibrancy.

In Colonial Williamsburg, a neglected Christian past is being restored.

The question of how to balance state and national power was perhaps the single most important and most challenging question confronting the early republic.

These Quakers led some of the early campaigns against sugar being produced by enslaved people.

The musical traditions found in contemporary Black U.S. and Caribbean Christian worship originated hundreds of years ago, continents away.

The history of French settlement in "le pays des Illinois" is not well-known by Americans, and what is known is being revisited by historians.

The first black settlers in the U.S. West.

In the new nonfiction collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” what emerges is a writer who mastered a Black idiom but seldom championed race pride.

Why three religious groups traded monogamy for celibacy, polygamy, and complex marriage.

The organic compounds that enabled industrialization are having unintended consequences for the planet’s life.

No matter the outcome of West Virginia v. EPA, the agency can take action to engage the public and make its data more accessible.

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.

Southern pro-slavery states weren't the only states calling for disunion before the Civil War erupted.

The 1954 US nuclear tests absolutely devastated the small island nation, but the US has steadfastly refused to make real amends for it.

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

Most Americans probably don’t know this piece of Black history. But they should.

Jarvis Givens rediscovers the underground history of black schooling.

When Executive Order 9066 forcibly removed my family from their community 80 years ago, we lost more than I realized.

The scholar has changed the way Black authors get read and the way Black history gets told.

The overlooked first mentor of Thomas Jefferson.

Unearthing the Black history in America’s national parks.

She animated the horror and emotional intensity in American labor songs by projecting them like a European opera singer.

From Seneca Village to “urban renewal,” the government has claimed Black property—rarely with the “just compensation” promised by the Fifth Amendment.

Close your eyes and imagine you’re married to Ernest Hemingway. Now, imagine it twice as bad, and you’ll be approaching the life story of Mary Welsh Hemingway.

What’s happening amid the coronavirus pandemic is nothing new.

A decade or two ago, opposing NATO expansion to Ukraine was a position espoused by pillars of the American establishment. What happened?

An act of love in the form of a medicinal tonic.

Why has Ukraine been a stumbling block for U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War?

Freedman's Village, created in Arlington, VA at the end of the Civil War, became a thriving community of Black residents as part of Reconstruction.

After the passing of William James, mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor.

Since the mid-19th century, manufacturers have marketed guns to white men, especially young ones.

It’s hard to imagine having more direct control over a foreign country’s political system — short of a straight-up military occupation.

When Thomas Jefferson’s administration was debating whether to declare war against Britain, it came up against America’s wealthy and influential marine underwriters.

The female image is ubiquitous on social media, yet when it comes to pictures of parents with their children many moms feel disappeared.

The revolutionary may have tried to find my grandfather by raiding a New Mexico village—but a friend’s camera truly captured our family patriarch.

As cholera swept through New York, people tried their best to survive.