Excerpts

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.

A friend of Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sewall Osgood's pursuit of her scientific passion illuminates the limits and possibilities placed on the era's women.

The anatomy of the “orphan train” genre.

For the poor, who are disproportionately people of color, the criminal justice system in the United States is essentially a plea-and-probation system.

Can a system built on racial violence actually deliver justice?

For more than 150 years after it was coined, “terrorism” meant violence inflicted by the state on its people. How did the word come to mean the reverse?

The flamboyant big-cat aficionados of the Gilded Age weren’t strangers to fierce competition, threats and bizarre drama.

Enacting vaccination mandates demands political give and take.

With Susan Ronald’s meticulous, relentless biography, Joseph P. Kennedy is now firmly established in the annals of twentieth-century fascism.

Conservatives can’t turn back the clock. But they can disrupt local meetings.

A history of the People’s Temple before the tragic murder-suicides.

David O. Stewart discusses the relationship between William Costin and the Washington bloodline.

Until school boards and administrators listen to teachers, they’ll end up with shortages in every crisis.

Though the organization’s legacy has been domesticated, its grassroots leadership embraced the global fight for freedom.

W.E.B. Du Bois defined the shift from slavery to freedom as a “general strike” — and there are parallels to today.

Racial covenants made it illegal for Black people to live in white neighborhoods. Now they're illegal, but you may still have one on your home's deed.

The settlers who are mythologized at Thanksgiving as peace-loving Pilgrims were offering cash for Native American heads less than a generation later.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

How racism has shaped the history — and present — of bicycle use.

What’s at stake in debates about the meaning and visibility of the Black Santa.

Over time, the historic roots of some holiday music have been forgotten.

Our country's legal history renders the teen's case familiar if not inevitable.

What we think we know about stifling inflation could be wrong.

The strongest resistance to taxation and redistribution came from the Northern ruling class.

The story of John Wolcott Phelps and his push for Lincoln to emancipate all slaves.

It’s a simple process that recurs throughout history: workers see injustice, they organize each other, and they fight for change.

In our own era of uncontrolled working hours, controlling our time is a vision of freedom worth capturing.

A violent confrontation between the IWW and the American Legion put organized labor on trial, but a hostile federal government didn’t stop the IWW from growing.

America is now ruled by a single elite class rather than by local patrician smart sets competing with each other for money and power.

In an excerpt from his new book, ‘Let the Lord Sort Them,’ Maurice Chammah explains where a 1970s legal team fighting the death penalty went wrong.

After Charlottesville, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wanted to find out how societies face up to their past—and why some fail.

As far back as WWI, militant unions like the International Ladies’ Garment Workers radicalized the campaign for health care and came within an inch of victory.

Many early Wyoming coal towns had thriving Black communities.

How statistics were used in the urban North to condemn Blackness as inherently criminal.

Having more than one wife was an established part of life for some Native peoples before Europeans tried to end the practice.

The CIA committed many crimes in the early days of post-independence Africa. But is it fair to call their interference “recolonization”?

Today, some Virginians would ‘protect’ children from the kind of valuable education that I had when my dad was governor.

Lazy assumptions about young and old cloud our politics.

Deemed “the greatest landscape painter in the West,” he achieved rare fame in his day.

American policy continues to create problems for Central American refugees.

This collection of colorized portraits transforms ex-slave narratives into freedom narratives in order to better remember the individuals who survived slavery.

A Story Map that highlights events, sites, and people important to Native American history.

A conversation with two journalists who were among the first to uncover evidence of a deadly rampage.

Joshua Cohen imagines how Philip Roth would review his own biographer.

Historian Melanie Newport turns to eBay.

Washington was a savvy packager of his own personal virtues. He knew that if you don’t engage in a bit of self-aggrandizement, you lose.

Civil War pension records have a lot to tell us about the lives of U.S. Colored Troops.

Board games invite discussions of counterfactuality and contingency, resisting the teleology and determinism that are so common to looking backward in time.