Excerpts

The Right's habit of defiance.

And the end of civilisation.

Amid bluster about warfighting and lethality, it is important to recall the moral burdens of war.

There are echoes in our political rhetoric of the men who helped talk the United States into civil war.

How a term coined to describe a nineteenth-century politics of exclusion would become a diagnosis, a political cudgel, and a rallying cry.

How the Democrats have alienated a growing number working-class voters.

Joseph Smith, religious innovator.

On his films and the way they provocatively confronted the evils of the times in which they were made.

Trump allies push “invasion” claims to justify suspending habeas corpus, a far-right legal effort years in the making.

LA’s fires and a century of landscape manipulation.

A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.

The economic vision of American industrialist Andrew Mellon loomed large over the boom and bust of the 1920s.

Clothing labels have often played a political role in the fight for the rights of garment workers.

Trump’s brand of authoritarianism emerges out of New York City’s real estate industry. As mayor, Zohran Mamdani vows to curb that sector’s outsized power.

Revisiting the lessons of Allan Bérubé’s 1990 history of queer solders during World War II.

In the mid-19th century, governments on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border set out to recast North America’s political landscape.

The pair’s new book recovers the sound of early Black music.

What New York City can learn from its past about the potential for urban growth that is not hostage to the preferences of the largest private owners.

Media focus on Charlie Kirk's presentation style while downplaying what he said and did is reminiscent of 1950s strategies for legitimizing Jim Crow.

The "Red Scare" echo in the Kimmel suspension.

Chief Justice John Roberts has now overseen 20 years of increasingly illiberal rulings by the Supreme Court.

Redford’s legacy as an environmental activist and his 1992 film "Sneakers" reveal his foresight on climate, politics, and surveillance.

In 1969, Otis Moss Jr led a push to ensure diversity among Santa Clauses. But the fight, he says, continues to this day.

What roles did SF State play in the broader upsurge in LGBTQ student and faculty activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

They rejected kings and were sincerely concerned about the possibility of a dictatorship. But we need to move past founder-worship and focus on justice.

Justice John Marshall’s ruling on Marbury v. Madison gave the courts the right to declare acts and laws of the other branches unconstitutional.

International relations and foreign influence helped end legal segregation of Mexican American students in California after World War II.

The first American woman to establish an independent architectural practice, Minerva Parker Nichols built an unprecedented career in Philadelphia.

A brief history of our most rebellious musical genre, as seen through its DIY zines.

There’s a lot more to Founding Father John Dickinson than not signing the Declaration of Independence.

Invented in 1922, water-skiing quickly became shorthand for American ideas on beauty, athleticism, and affluence.

The twentieth century saw America discard representative government when it comes to war.

On Ralph Waldo Emerson, his childhood in Boston, and his thoughts on mortality.

Gouverneur Morris wrote the preamble to the Constitution. Later in life, he rejected the foundational document as a failure.

On the role that medical and health professionals played in raising suspicions of The Twist.

James R. Schlesinger was only head of the CIA for six months, but he nevertheless ranks as the least popular director in the agency’s history.

If we dismiss concepts because of particular examples of misuse, we encourage the repression of discomforting histories and ideas.

The radical lives of James Baldwin.

The Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Spanish Civil War offered Melva L. Price an opportunity to examine the links between racism and fascism.

A Q&A with the author of "America, América: “A New History of the New World.”

The term “white trash” once was used to disparage poor white people. In the Civil Rights era, its meaning shifted to support business-friendly racial politics.

Using the antiquated language of "vagrancy," Trump Administration officials are tapping into a long history of policing.

A baseball’s forgotten pioneer was MLB’s third Black player. A war hero and gifted hitter, his troubled life defied the halo.

Newly discovered documents reveal Robert McNamara’s private doubts about Vietnam.

The centuries-long debate over who and what college is for has yet to be resolved.

College football’s NIL era has freed athletes but fueled chaos, soaring costs, and fan backlash.

Joyce Johnson on the friendship between two famous outsiders.

Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Cowley, and the difficult birth of "On the Road."

The murals at Croatian Catholic Church of St. Nicholas in Millvale do indeed have an implicit politics that was intimately familiar to the congregation.

In correspondence with an abolitionist in London, the great American orator didn’t hold back when talking about Abraham Lincoln, or the maligned Andrew Johnson.