Excerpts

The settlers who are mythologized at Thanksgiving as peace-loving Pilgrims were offering cash for Native American heads less than a generation later.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

How racism has shaped the history — and present — of bicycle use.

What’s at stake in debates about the meaning and visibility of the Black Santa.

Over time, the historic roots of some holiday music have been forgotten.

Our country's legal history renders the teen's case familiar if not inevitable.

What we think we know about stifling inflation could be wrong.

The legacy of slavery is often invoked to explain the stunted welfare state. But the strongest resistance to taxation and redistribution came from the Northern ruling class.

The story of John Wolcott Phelps and his push for Lincoln to emancipate all slaves.

It’s a simple process that recurs throughout history: workers see injustice, they organize each other, and they fight for change.

In our own era of uncontrolled working hours, controlling our time is a vision of freedom worth capturing.

A violent confrontation between the IWW and the American Legion put organized labor on trial, but a hostile federal government didn’t stop the IWW from growing.

America is now ruled by a single elite class rather than by local patrician smart sets competing with each other for money and power.

In an excerpt from his new book, ‘Let the Lord Sort Them,’ Maurice Chammah explains where a 1970s legal team fighting the death penalty went wrong.

After Charlottesville, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wanted to find out how societies face up to their past—and why some fail.

As far back as WWI, militant unions like the International Ladies’ Garment Workers radicalized the campaign for health care and came within an inch of victory.

Many early Wyoming coal towns had thriving Black communities.

How statistics were used in the urban North to condemn Blackness as inherently criminal.

Having more than one wife was an established part of life for some Native peoples before Europeans tried to end the practice.

The CIA committed many crimes in the early days of post-independence Africa. But is it fair to call their interference “recolonization”?

Today, some Virginians would ‘protect’ children from the kind of valuable education that I had when my dad was governor.

Lazy assumptions about young and old cloud our politics.

Deemed “the greatest landscape painter in the West,” he achieved rare fame in his day.

American policy continues to create problems for Central American refugees.

This collection of colorized portraits transforms ex-slave narratives into freedom narratives in order to better remember the individuals who survived slavery.

A Story Map that highlights events, sites, and people important to Native American history.

A conversation with two journalists who were among the first to uncover evidence of a deadly rampage.

Joshua Cohen imagines how Philip Roth would review his own biographer.

Historian Melanie Newport turns to eBay.

Washington was a savvy packager of his own personal virtues. He knew that if you don’t engage in a bit of self-aggrandizement, you lose.

Civil War pension records have a lot to tell us about the lives of U.S. Colored Troops.

Board games invite discussions of counterfactuality and contingency, resisting the teleology and determinism that are so common to looking backward in time.

But the media is treating him differently than it treated Matthew Joseph Rodermund more than a century ago.

At the height of the Reconstruction, the pressing issue of the election was Black male suffrage.

The writer had a deep bond with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he also had a profound connection with Emerson’s wife.

How Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, caught on in tight-knit Concord, Massachusetts.

How the commission that led to the creation of the U.S.’s public television and radio systems can serve as a model for countering disinformation today.

Claudette Colvin is a Civil Rights hero you've probably never heard of. In 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat, months before Rosa Parks.

The front lines of a terrible epidemic, through the eyes of a young doctor profoundly touched by tragedy.

Once, abolitionists had to imagine a world without slavery. Can we similarly envision a world where migrants are offered justice?

The majority-female platoon from North Vietnam that fought against U.S. forces in the Vietnam War.

During the 1840s, landlords tried to drive out tenants in default. The movement that rose to challenge evictions can be a model for today’s housing activists.

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball’s white supremacist great-great-grandfather becomes a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery.

How the federal government enlisted ordinary citizens to spy on each other for the war effort.

Fake news has been central to the Lost Cause narrative since its inception, employed to justify and amplify the symbolism of Confederate monuments and flags.

The United States has a terrible habit of letting white supremacy get away with repeated attempts to murder American democracy.

Contractors are increasingly doing dangerous work helping our troops — without any of the recognition.

After Japan's surrender, U.S. troops rebelled against a plan to keep them overseas, staging dramatic protests from the Philippines to Guam.

The rise of the first Black woman on the Louisiana Supreme Court was characterized by one battle after another with the Deep South’s white power structure.

Laws against teaching critical race theory might backfire on Republicans.