Excerpts

McCarthy imagined a vast border region where colonial empires clashed, tribes went to war, and bounty hunters roamed.

A brief history of their tangled saga of patriotism and dissent.

Crossword puzzles may be a recent invention, but since we've had language we've played games with words.

The United States often touts itself as a "nation of immigrants," but this obscures the real story.

The life of Guitar Shorty was a mixture of facts, lies and fantasy. He was a blues musician who lived far outside mainstream society.

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.

Meditations on when you think you found the people who owned your people via DNA test.

Cluelessness about Native people is rampant in New England, which romanticizes its Colonial heritage.

Whether exploring the dread of everyday life or the horrors of the occult, her ghost tales documented a nation haunted by isolation, class, and despair.

The discovery of the remains of the Clotilda, 160 years after it sank, brings new life and interest to the settlement built by the original survivors.

Mass lynchings of Black people following the Civil War.

The road to right-wing deregulation began on our nation's highways.

We looked at 138 formerly redlined cities and found most were still segregated — just like they were designed to be.

The 1619 Project and contested foundings.

An American conservatism which subtly or directly marginalizes the Founding is on a fast track to a conservatism at odds with America’s roots itself.

Daina Ramey Berry details the life of the outspoken activist Sojourner Truth and her legendary speaking tour.

Once Peter Parker received his miraculous spider powers, the last thing he wanted to do was go out and get a colorful costume and fight crime.

Vaccine skepticism and misinformation have persisted since the smallpox epidemics. With the internet, it's only gotten worse.

How rooting for American athletes became part of Olympic TV coverage.

It is in the hidden spaces of American empire that the realities of power can truly be seen.

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking.

The island was once a place of working-class ingenuity and Black daring.

The life of Judah Benjamin, a Southern Jew who served in the Confederate government, can tell us only so much about the American Jewish encounter with slavery.

Efforts to clamp down on White House leaks to the press follow a pattern that was set during the Nixon era after the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

The daughter and granddaughter of a former internee return to the notorious WWI-era detention site for Japanese-Americans.

East European Jews and the lost world of immigrant banking.

Our secular government is all tangled up with God. How did we get here?

Of mice and men.

When Sidney Poitier slapped a white murder suspect on screen, it changed how the stories of Black Americans were portrayed on film.

Trump’s shredding of paper in the White House was far more widespread and indiscriminate than previously known.

A new feminist history of women and exercise glosses over the darker side of fitness culture.

The fevered hunt for basic symbols.

The music industry is thriving — but it’s not always trickling down to artists.

The Panamanian garment worker turned labor organizer, Pan-Africanist, and anti-colonial activist advocated for US and African workers amid a Cold War freeze.

Fewer fires are burning worldwide than at any time since antiquity. But in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable.

The conservative plot to suppress the Black vote has relied on racist caricatures, then and now.

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

They’ve just been sitting in the dining room all this time.

For decades, America’s governing elite caricatured sensible restraint in order to pursue geopolitical dominance and endless wars. At last the folly may be over.

Cocktails — the ingredients, the stories, the pageantry — can reveal more than expected about the Gilded Age.

Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations.

Environment, British occupation, and The winter of 1779-1780.

In Maryland, a memorial for two lynching victims reveals how America is grappling with its history of racial terror.

The inequitable dismissal of US soldiers following the conclusion of the Civil War.

Yes, the Russian leader is an authoritarian aggressor. But different decisions at key points by the U.S. might have made him less so.

For far too long, Americans have used football to sell the ideas of democracy and fair play. But for Black America, this is an illusion.

The Lehman Trilogy proposes that the downfall of a financial dynasty is enough to tell the economic and political history of America.

How to hide an empire, from the Spanish-American war to CIA-sponsored Latin American coups.

Hiding behind "academic freedom," E. O. Wilson actively propagated race pseudoscience in collusion with white supremacists.

Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. discusses his new memoir.