Excerpts

Man Ray made art that looked like the future. How did he become a minor figure?

The Movement for Black Lives has developed an incipient internationalist language and vision, with the potential to remap America’s place in the world.

Antebellum slaveholders weren't content with an economic and social system based on trafficking in human flesh in the South alone.

In his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.

Policies dating to the 1930s have helped shape the conflict defining today’s politics.

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

Trump tried to exploit flaws that were embedded in the law from the start.

The inspiration for the 1964 “Extremism in the defense of liberty” speech he wrote for Barry Goldwater.

A collaborative project that set out in the summer of 2020 to document the removal of monuments through both official and unofficial channels.

The story played out very differently in Philadelphia and Charleston, and not in the way you might expect.

The life and political commitments of screenwriter Ben Hecht.

This historian and politician helped transform how several generations understood 18th- and 19th-century history.

Undocumented workers have been foundational to the rise of our most vaunted hub of innovative capitalism.

Tech was meant to help us transcend our most intractable problems. What went wrong?

Relying on private contractors has always created problems for the U.S. military.

A massive assessment of the nation's current monument landscape, posing questions about common knowledge and debunking misperceptions within public memory.

At three plantations in Charleston, S.C., Black descendants are connecting with their family’s history and helping reshape the narrative.

In 1831, a group of white rioters razed the Providence neighborhood of Snowtown. Now, archaeologists are excavating its legacy.

And why they’re scared we might break up with their favorite appliance.

George Henry Thomas, southerner in blue.

Gay marriage was a victory, we’re told—but a victory for what?

Frederick Douglass and Republican legislators had high hopes for Andrew Johnson—but ended up impeaching him.

Interrogated, examined, blackmailed: how law enforcement treated abortion-seeking women before Roe.

A new book argues that the real estate industry’s campaign to defend housing segregation still echoes in today’s politics.

Law and culture forced LGBTQ people into marriages, but that didn't prevent them from exploring their sexuality.

A murder charge, a media frenzy, a banishment, and accusations of sexual abuse in Hollywood. What can the Arbuckle affair, now 100 years old, teach us today?

The little-known story of Robert Carter III.

The psychological forces driving “red COVID” have deep historical roots.

Yale's John Fabian Witt pens a review of Samuel Moyn's new book, Humane.

Ideas about working from the employee perspective.

This armed uprising in 1794, over taxation by the fledgling new government, threatened to destroy the new union within six years of the Constitution’s ratification.

Revisiting the relationships of “a man who never smiled.”

It’s time to demand law enforcement accountability for the death of unarmed citizens not just on America’s streets but also in our prisons.

Historian Samuel Moyn contends that efforts to conduct war humanely have only perpetuated it. But the solution must lie in politics, not a sacrifice of human rights.

How one video game tells the story of an industry.

Even as they carve out space for Black scholarship, established universities remain deeply complicit in racial capitalism. We must think beyond them.

New technical analysis dates Yale's Vinland Map to the 1920s or later, not the 1440s as previously suggested.

Exploring the history of U.S. empire through the story of Fort Huachuca – the “Guardian of the Frontier.”

In 1974, the culture wars came to Kanawha County, West Virginia, inciting protests over school curriculum.

Archaeology and genetics keep rewriting the ancient peopling of the Americas.

Putting Black characters in situations familiar to White viewers aims to build empathy and interest.

What the border fight means for one of the nation’s most potent, and most violent, myths.

Athenian democracy in the political imagination.

Philip Rieff predicted that therapy culture would end in barbarism.

These communities allowed for blending fact and fiction in creating new identities.

Reflections on Richard Wright’s recently published novel, "The Man Who Lived Underground."

The original cowboys were actually Indigenous, Black and Latinx, but that's not what Hollywood has generally led us to believe.

Updating the Registry Act and uncoupling legalization from punitive measures could be first steps.

Behind Britney Spears's struggle to regain control of her fortune and her medical decisions is a long history of robbing women of basic freedoms.

American immigration policy towards Haitians has been cruel for decades.