Excerpts

And that’s exactly why there is no need to overreact.

Lawmakers are undoing the worst parts of 1980s drug legislation, but they have forgotten its ties to immigration enforcement.

A digital atlas that visualizes Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s transformations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

An underexamined aspect of Manchin’s pro-business positions in the Senate is his early membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council.

A reissued collection, long out of print, revives the author’s masterly stories of horror and unease.

Why Democrats have struggled to implement their agenda.

It’s time to adopt paid parental leave as a right.

A new way to think about the American Revolution.

Patent medicine used to be associated with fraud and profiteering. What shifted the industry's positions on medical ethics and intellectual property?

Why it's so important to remember even our ugliest and most racist chapters.

In 1850s Vermont, Achsa Sprague swore that the spirits who helped her walk again also possessed her with a crucial mission: freeing every soul in America.

Late 1960s conflicts within the armed forces produced efforts to educate service members on racism.

The debate over how to teach the history of race in the U.S. is entangling local school boards and engulfing national politics.

How much did slave owners pay for antebellum-era policies from Aetna, AIG, and New York Life?

The veneration of the Constitution is directly connected to America’s emergence as global hegemon.

The perils of turning the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade into a political symbol.

A new book challenges the notion that independent inventors were shunted aside in the 20th century by anonymous scientists in corporate research laboratories.

A digital exhibit on the history and legacy of the canal.

From My Lai to Desert Storm to WMDs.

Colonial America was divided over smallpox inoculation, but he championed science to skeptic.

On the history (and future) of class struggle in America.

A breakdown of how Woody Guthrie's hit song "This Land" has evolved over time.

For decades, historians believed that the Department's files had been lost forever. Now copies of those files are available in this searchable digital archive.

Since the 19th century, women have abandoned restrictive undergarments while pursuing social and political freedom.

Robert Nisbet predicted the managerialism that has brought universities low. But he also saw a way out.

History books remember Yorktown as a "victory for the right of self-determination." But the battle guaranteed slavery for nearly another century.

The human rights activist and former sharecropper once said that “you are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free.”

Civil War veterans could be unmanned by drinking too much, and their service did not insulate them from postwar blights on their manhood.

The “peaceful revolution” of rural electrification.

The right’s facile comparisons of the two presidents miss the vastly different circumstances facing Biden and distort Carter’s record.

In “The Loneliest Americans,” Jay Caspian Kang asks whether Asian American identity can be rescued from people like him.

Long buried, the 1871 Chinese Massacre surfaces amid a significant anniversary and a new wave of violence.

And why stopping the subsidies can help bring it back.

Tree ring evidence of an ancient solar storm enables scientists to pinpoint the exact year of Norse settlement.

Republicans in Texas, and indeed around the country, remain hell-bent on going back to the future.

We keep trying to assess schools quantitatively instead of grappling with some deeper problems.

The Haitian migrant crisis is the latest stage in a decades-long legacy of mistreatment by the U.S. government, much of which unfolded at Cuban detention facilities.

They believed that wealth should have no bearing on a citizen’s voting power.

We say we’re for it. We’ve never truly had it. These next few years will determine its fate.

America, you’ve got the dates wrong. Your intense debate over which year marks the real beginning of the United States—1619 (slavery’s arrival) or 1776.

Across party lines, Americans actually agree on teaching “divisive concepts.”

How a grassroots movement of farmers laid the foundation for state intervention in the economy, challenging the slaveholding South.

The resurgence of the wild rice harvest seeks to tells the story of settler colonialism, tribal kinship and ecological stewardship.

Americans don't need to rely on legends to tell the stories of women in the Revolution.

Maritime workers who were basically kidnapped into the British Royal Navy were a key force in the War of Independence.

Let’s remember that performative anti-racism is as profitable politically as racism has been.

From boomers to zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.

From drowning to murders to the mental toll of isolation, these stoic towers carry a full share of tragedy.

The U.S. needs another innovation dream team.

In the 19th century, freedom from government interference mapped onto opposition of women's rights.