Excerpts

Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. discusses his new memoir.

When the river freezes, lives change.

84 years ago this week, this Mexican American labor organizer led one of the largest strikes in Texas history—and was arrested and blacklisted for her trouble.

A document thought lost to history shows how Sojourner Truth became the first Black woman to successfully sue white men to get her son released from slavery.

Because of consistent government intervention in the industry, we might call fast food the quintessential cuisine of global capitalism.

Margaret Wise Brown constantly pushed boundaries—in her life and in her art.

And why spying on the “bums” has been terrible for schools.

Normalization of deviance is a useful concept that was developed to explain how the Challenger disaster happened.

Who was Dave Prater?

Why did a local official, at the turn of the twentieth century, maintain a ledger tracking Chinese residents?

The different ways news media approaches pandemic reporting.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said America faces an economic crisis fifty years in the making. But how can we name the long crisis, much less explain it?

Rampant outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics are the culprits.

Unable to bear the shame of being captured as a prisoner of war, Shoichi Yokoi hid in the jungles of Guam until January 1972.

Over the past century, the United States came to rely ever more on economic coercion—with questionable results.

In her lifetime, Dorothy Day rejected canonization for herself. Now revived, this bad idea would only diminish the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

A 1763 massacre by colonial settlers exposed the the irreconcilable contradictions of conquest by people concerned with civility.

There are revelations in a newly digitized collection of slave narratives compiled by a professor and his students during the Great Depression.

On Raoul Peck's "Exterminate all the Brutes" and the limits of rewriting the narrative.

The Resettlement Administration was one of the New Deal’s most radical, far-reaching, and highly criticized programs, and it lasted just two years.

Much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy in the news today is similar to a movement that swept the country 20 years ago.

The women of May 19th bombed the U.S. Capitol and plotted Henry Kissinger’s murder. But they’ve been long forgotten.

In June 1942, Kenji and just over one hundred other children were taken from their parents and relocated to Manzanar.

Confederates’ quest for bones connects to a bizarre history of the use, and misuse, of human remains.

How the rise of alternative, "natural," medicines led Americans to equate food with moral character.

What else is lost when an object disappears?

The Bidens' new cat Willow will be the first feline in the White House since the George W. Bush years, but is part of a long tradition.

Early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years.

Year-by-year maps of homesteading claims and the dispossession of Native Americans.

How can historic data about segregation, redlining, and real estate be more accessible? In this interview, we dive into a new data set derived from HOLC maps.

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?

The man who introduced mesmerism to the US was a slave-owner from Guadeloupe, where planters were experimenting with “magnetizing” their enslaved people.

Of the 270,000 photos commissioned to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed.” Explore the hole-punched archive and the void at its center.

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.

She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?

Understanding the meaning of the word "slut" in the Founders' vocabulary.

Did the iconic three-note sequence come from Stravinsky, the Muppets or somewhere else? Our writer set out to – dun, dun duuuun! – reveal the mystery.

James Blue’s film investigated the destruction of a Black neighborhood in Houston, but it is also a powerful self-interrogation.

Nothing could be more toxic to our ongoing effort to build a multiracial democracy than to cast any race as a perennial hero or villain.

Bringing to light the kinship among American wars—and, by extension, their true significance—requires situating them in a single historical framework.

Since their initial popularity during World War II, comic books have always been a medium for American counterculture and for nativism and empire. 

A new book explores California’s history through the experience of its Native peoples.

Using the congressional filibuster to prevent voting rights legislation isn't new. It has roots in the 19th century.

One hundred and twenty five years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, there are still lessons to be gleaned from the case.

The Left once tried to own the legacy of America’s Bicentennial, but ran into ideological and structural roadblocks all too familiar today.

The original book is far more grisly than the beloved Disney classic—and has an unsettling message about humanity.

The white pine known as Tree 103 had lost the dewy glow that it had back in 1675.

The erasure of Black leaders from the most misunderstood period in American history.

How the 33rd president finagled his way to a post–White House fortune — and created a damaging precedent.

One of the last survivors of Boston’s Gangland War of the 1960s opens up about his notorious past.