Excerpts

The media must make the long years of organizing as visible as the eruptions and uprisings.

Exploring freedpeople’s struggle against police brutality during Reconstruction.

As we mine the 1940s for alternate visions of international order, we must not presume that the US remains the benevolent center of global politics.

A pair of new books about US Marshal Wyatt Earp are now out. Only one of them shoots straight.

An accomplice of Emmett Till's killers murdered a Black man in a neighboring town, and there were parallels in the trials.

At the height of his powers, the Black Nationalist leader was assassinated, and the government botched the investigation of his murder.

A lethal incident of police brutality in Miami in 1979 offers just one of countless examples of the reality generations of African Americans have faced.

Here’s how the distribution of genres has changed since 1945 up to present.

Debating a modern parable about waste and technology.

A geologist and cartographer dreamed up a captivating, colorful, visually succinct way of representing the river's fluctuations through space and time.

When most people hear the word “punk,” they think of drug addled, nasty behavior. The truth is, it was driven by a visceral hatred for the president.

Fidel Castro's visit to Harlem at the intersection of two themes that shaped the 1960s: the Black freedom struggle and global protest during the Cold War.

Eugene Debs’s unswerving commitment to democracy and internationalism was born out of his revulsion at the tyranny of industrial capitalism.

In 1949, truncheon-wielding police officers descended on the racially integrated concert of singer Paul Robeson.

Descendants of the Pilgrims have highlighted their ancestors’ role in the country’s founding. But their sanitized version of events is only now starting to be told in full.

A response to claims that the First Thanksgiving was not a "thanksgiving" as the Pilgrims understood it.

Is Trump a fascist? You should ask the same question of your local police.

The short-lived radical movement within feminism has gotten a bad reputation for centering white women's experiences. Is that deserved?

How the Civil War-era historian effectively invented a distinctly American tradition of historiography.

What happened to the last million Eastern Europeans in refugee camps in Germany, who refused to return home, or who had no home to return to.

A bill making ethnic studies a graduation requirement for California public-school students is expected to be signed by Governor Newsom.

The forgotten history of Thanksgiving.

How a beloved song with origins in 16th-century Europe captures both a holiday's spirit of unity and a country's legacy of exclusion.

He prized self-control above all, but did not always achieve it.

Fifty years ago, Newark, New Jersey, elected its first Black mayor—Kenneth Gibson—at a moment when there was an urgency to address police violence.

In a recent speech, Trump looks to America's past for answers. However, the history he recounts is glaringly limited.

The two decades leading up to WWII featured numerous connections between America and Nazi Germany that reveal Nazism was never simply a foreign or enemy force.

In Oakland, California, when it comes to Black homelessness and dispossession, dystopia is already here.

Shakespeare's Macbeth and the Federal Theatre Project

On the corrupt, contaminated, deceptive world of 19th-century food adulteration, and how Cohen's own work straddles pure academia and public-facing scholarship.

It’s the biggest battle on U.S. soil that most Americans have never heard of.

The study of circuit riding helps to highlight the importance of the lower federal courts in American legal history.

How the self-proclaimed "First Widow" used her celebrity to influence public opinion.

Cailloux’s valor, and the Black troops he led in battle, electrified northern opinion and gave federal race policy a strong jolt.

World War I was a catastrophic, barbaric conflict that left tens of millions of people dead and set the stage for anti-democratic rollbacks for years to come.

Power, plague and Christianity were closely intertwined in 17th-century New England.

Returning the "three sisters" to Native American farms nourishes people, land, and cultures.

A dispatch from Wounded Knee that layers the realities of poverty, climate change, and resilience on the history of colonization, settlement, and genocide.

A revised history of the interstate highway system.

Pass the free enterprise, please.

A number of recent books blame the rise of neoliberalism on economists. But the evidence suggests it is still capital that rules.

Biased ideas about a link between body size and health have led many people to dismiss unexpected scientific findings.

The irrational, the political, and fear of elections in colonial Pennsylvania.

James Shapiro’s recent book looks at why Shakespeare has been a mainstay of the cultural and political conflicts of the country since its founding.

The story of Caesar, an enslaved chef and chocolatier in colonial Virginia.

Guns have always loomed large in Black people's lives — going all the way back to the days of colonial slavery, explains reporter Alain Stephens from The Trace.

History offers some pointers for government regulators.

In The Loud Minority, Daniel Gillion examines the relationship between electoral politics and protest movements.

He didn’t make a penny.

Today’s “medical freedom” warriors are drawing on a centuries-old American tradition.