Excerpts

In every generation, charlatans come along with a plan to make education better by spending less money on schools.

Josie Rudolph’s life, in an era of worldwide migration and colonial ambition, offers a new perspective on the familiar tale of modern Alaska’s birth.

The very American racism of the notorious late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Grover Cleveland enthusiasts aren’t thrilled that Donald Trump won a nonconsecutive presidential term.

Shaul Magid attempts to show us how much contemporary Jews have inherited from a man most have tried to forget.

How can we most efficiently defend the imperiled academy?

Justin B. Wymer knows a snake when he sees one.

On a documentary in which stars from Bob Dylan to Nile Rodgers discuss how music played a vital role in the unknown politician’s rise to power.

There’s a reason the 39th president is still revered by former Soviet dissidents.

The Baptist Georgia governor won evangelical Christian voters in the 1976 presidential election. Next time around, those voters changed sides—for the long haul.

Common conceptions of Carter are all wrong because they don’t acknowledge a crucial reality: he was a conservative.

Trump’s canal comments resurrect a forgotten American interest.

Jimmy Carter is known as a eradicator of disease and champion for world peace, but he also supported environmental efforts closer to home.

Tamara Thomsen discovered a 1,200-year-old dugout canoe in Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota in 2021, spurring efforts to catalog historic canoes statewide.

Tim LaHaye bridged Reagan-era anti-Communism to today’s Christian Nationalism, opposing humanism, evolution, and secularism, emphasizing biblical morality.

The Bob Dylan film forefronts a conflict between acoustic and electric music, while ignoring how the Vietnam War divided folk musicians.

A new book by Sarah Archer explores the influence of the Space Race and Cold War on America's midcentury Christmas celebrations.

The paths the country took out of that earlier crisis offer valuable lessons for what we should do now, and what we should fear.

The number of infected people, measured over 70-some years and across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, declined after vaccines were introduced.

In 1979, Carter's "malaise speech," shaped by sociological insights, sought national unity but clashed with Reagan's appeal to individualism.

Jimmy Carter is associated with an idealistic “human rights agenda.” In reality, he was paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism.

Our political and cultural systems are obsessed with exploiting fears about crime. But it wasn’t always this way.

His unwillingness to take a radical stance forced him to respond to events by imposing austerity and doing little to strengthen labor.

In 1978, Carter protected 56M Alaskan acres, tripled wilderness lands, championed conservation, and foresaw climate risks, leaving a lasting green legacy.

You can argue over whether Jimmy Carter was America’s greatest president, but he was undoubtedly one of the greatest Americans to ever become president.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, gave visibility to devastating health problems that are often invisible.

Jimmy Carter, skeptical of NASA's shuttle, saved it with funding despite delays and opposition. His Voyager message carries hope deep into space.

Team photographs at a nuclear weapons factory offer a glimpse into the mundanity and materiality of the bomb.

As a worker in the 1970s, I looked forward to a Jimmy Carter administration. By the end of his term in office, I felt betrayed.

He tackled segregation in the nation’s public colleges and fraud in student-aid programs, and established the Department of Education.

As President, he told us that we needed to shift to solar power. We should have listened to him then.

Highest-level national security documents reveal a tough-minded, detail-oriented president.

Earth First! was founded in 1980 to defend wildlife and wilderness areas more directly and uncompromisingly than most environmental groups.

If ever a book ought not to be judged by its cover, Edgar Allan Poe’s debut collection, "Tamerlane and Other Poems," is that book.

During the Great Depression, financial elites translated European fascism into an American form that joined high capital with lower middle-class populism.

It radically shifted the way the world looked at the environment, but created a wave of misinformation we’re still dealing with today.

NYC subway etiquette reflects socio-economic divides.

Chinese immigrants sacrificed to create America's first transcontinental railroad. Its completion contributed to a backlash that led to immigration clampdown.

How gang-nail plates led to bigger homes.

Since George Floyd’s murder, some white allies seek ways to fight racial inequality. Detroit’s 1960s "racially parallel organizing" offers insights.

One speech permanently influenced American diplomacy—and not for the better.

We must stand by the principles of the open society, pluralism, freedom, and mutual toleration.

UnitedHealthcare, the health insurer whose CEO was murdered, has spent decades fighting and winning political battles to maintain the for-profit health system.

On the medallic art of the Gilded Age.

To understand discourse around “Christian nationalism,” look no further than the abolitionist hailed by many on the left.

Ed Hardy's historic tattoo parlor is closing. A lot more than that stands to be lost.

A sweeping new history chronicles a century of unprecedented economic progress driven by markets and innovation.

The Alien Enemies Act, first approved in the late 1700s, was last used during World War II to identify particular foreign nationals living in the US.

It's crucial to understand the real history behind claims that men are being marginalized.

A new collection of essays by David Montgomery shows how he used labor history as a means of grappling with the largest questions in American history.