Excerpts

From the Nye Committee to Joe Kent, the fight against war profiteering is a constant struggle.

Muscular Christianity — with scriptural interpretations that can favor “stand your ground” over “turn the other cheek” — has a long tradition in the U.S.

How a story told by a fugitive from slavery became a parable of American banking gone bad.

Museums construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally.

As the GOP undermines Black political rights in the present, some right-wing intellectuals are rationalizing Black disenfranchisement in the past.

If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed nothing.

There are important differences between Xi Jinping’s China and the Soviet Union, but the Cold War still offers clear strategic guidance for the U.S.

Tammy Wynette and Johnny Cash cancelled gigs in Belfast during the violent 1970s, but Pride played on.

Calls for the court to remain neutral have long been tools for denying Americans rights.

A three-decade dream of communist markets ended in the scrapyard.

Toward the end of his life, Frederick Douglass served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Haiti.

Artists, museums and other groups are vying to claim fallen monuments from the Jim Crow era — but for very different reasons.

The beloved musical’s creator struggled to find a place between left and center.

A guide for the perplexed, the puzzled, and the politically confused.

Once derided as cesspools of Reagan-era consumerist excess, the shopping mall somehow became an unlikely sort-of quasi-public space that is now disappearing.

Critiques of vaccine mandates continue a neoliberal tradition of idolizing private choice at the expense of the public good.

Listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears again.

Ryan White’s story both reinforced and challenged assumptions about the disease.

Let's recognize the scholar who was behind the other "CRT."

How a clown won over several generations of children.

Repeated failures by both political parties to get a decent policy through our 18th-century constitutional structure led to the Affordable Care Act.

A blinking cursor follows us everywhere in the digital world, but who invented it and why?

How 19th century slave traders used, and reused, the brig named Uncas.

Seeing the war from the perspective of citizens of U.S. colonies sheds new light on the impact of World War II.

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.

Bodybuilding is routinely presented as the very apex of male heterosexuality—but its history is a bit gayer than you might think.

The show never took a singular position on social issues. The point was to wrestle with the story itself in hopes of sparking self-awareness and contemplation.

The United States confined 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. They’re still pushing for redress.

How a sitting, elected national government found itself in the position of having to buy its own country.

CB radio was portrayed as a mostly white enthusiasm in its heyday, but Black CB users were active as early as 1959.

The actor who played the loveable grocer found his way to Sesame Street after being blacklisted during the Red Scare.

The challenges of 536 CE, including cold temperatures and volcanic fallout, prompted a flourishing of Ancestral Pueblo society.

167 Black soldiers were dishonorably discharged from the army in 1906. Two Angelenos corrected the historical record in the 1970s.

Tens of thousands of sick and injured soldiers became addicted.

Sheryll Cashin’s “White Space, Black Hood” shows how economic discrimination combines with racial injustice in America’s housing policy.

The former Republican leader played a key role in the Americans With Disabilities Act but stuck with the GOP as the party turned its back on the law.

ONE is a vital archive, but its focus on citizenship and “rational acceptance” ultimately blocked it from being the safe home for all that it claimed to be.

In his lifetime, Robert Welch toiled in the mocked and marginal fringe. Today his ideas are the mainstream of the American right.

There are more than 400 million guns in Americans' hands.

Discrimination and mistranslation have long obscured the dish's true origins.

On the origins, use, and abuse of mugshots.

The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it.

A brief history on land ownership, valuation and development in the City of Richmond and the maps used to destroy black communities.

Before presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, before Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, there was Congresswoman and firebrand Bella Abzug.

A century ago, the most effective school-ban campaign in American history set the pattern: noise and fear, but not much change in what schools actually teach.

This isn’t the first time a House committee has investigated political violence in the Capitol.

When medicine and journalism defeated cholera.

The Texas Rangers were vicious enforcers of white power. J.T. Canales, who once fought against them lost, but the reckoning he sought is finally underway.

George III was a model monarch, whose reputation finally deserves rehabilitation a quarter of a millennium later.

The historian Allen C. Guelzo believes that the Confederate general deserves a more compassionate reading.