Excerpts

For economist Albert Hirschman, social planning meant creative experimentation rather than theoretical certainty.

Hannah Arendt holds firm during the McCarthy era.

In October 1971, The Electric Company flipped a switch and hit the public TV airwaves, aiming to use sketch comedy and animated shorts to teach kids to read.

This year’s Juneteenth commemorations must take a deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation to understand what emancipation really means.

I had sung the Black National Anthem countless times, but hearing those words reverberate around me in this place, on this day, moved me in a new way.

How a dark-money mogul bankrolled an astroturf backlash.

Photographs of empty city streets went out of fashion, but lately are coming back again. What's lost in these images of vacant streets?

Scholars have yet to identify the young boy, but new research offers insights on his age and likely background.

For most people, birthdays were once just another day. Industrialization changed that.

From the first morbid films a hundred years ago, scary movies always been a dark mirror on Americans’ deepest fears and anxieties.

Her performances of the Black spiritual in the nineteen-thirties caused American and European audiences to fall silent in awe.

After the U.S Supreme Court forced school integration in early 1970, white families fled to either racist Central Academy or new Mennonite schools.

Benjamin Franklin's writing about losing his son to smallpox is a must-read for parents weighing COVID-19 vaccines today.

“Here we are, a group of Black lesbian feminist anti-imperialist anti-capitalists trying to do the right thing.”

Black people own just 2 percent of farmland in the United States. A decades-long history of loan denials at the USDA is a major reason why.

You can work around some of the holes this lack of access creates, but it takes years.

You get no windows. You take what you can get.

Florida’s move to silence expert criticism of its disenfranchisement campaign echoes its Redemption-era assault on civil rights.

Regulations limiting armed travel in public, particularly in populous areas, stretch back over seven centuries.

The Pentagon is increasing its forces on the US territory, but Indigenous residents are fighting back.

How the secular movement underestimated the endurance of religion.

On Juneteenth, we should remember both the struggle against chattel slavery and the struggle for radical freedom during Reconstruction.

The surgeons’ observations survive thanks to a remarkable document: an eleven-page published report presented to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

A history of cemetery workers' strikes.

June Holmes was in her late twenties, working as a social worker on Long Island, when she first heard about “this thing called AIDS.”

The connections between private industry and government were much more fluid than was previously imagined.

What gets lost when we view the American past as primarily a story about capitalism? 

What if America's inability to agree on its shared history—and how to teach it—is a cause of our polarization and political dysfunction, rather than a symptom?

Sixty years ago, a pathbreaking jazz album fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation. Black artists are taking similar strides today.

Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District was razed by the federal government 65 years ago. Now developers are testing the question of how to correct for a racist past.

How white-owned newspapers incited racial terror in America.

The inventor thought her pregnant sister looked like “a beach ball in an unmade bed.”

The untold story of a world-renowned architect, an obsessive librarian, and a $5,500 house that never was.

Channeling conservative, white anger about public schools is a long-running political strategy.

Born after the Civil War, he turned himself into its most powerful witness—and modernized the American novel.

New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on businesses, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people.

Annie Berke reviews Elana Levine's book on a pivotal genre and its diverse fandom.

A 90-year-old amateur archaeologist who claimed to have detonated the first atomic bomb was one of the most prolific grave robbers in modern American history.

Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough.

Drawing analogies between industries can be instructive. But only if we do it right.

The last from-the-top critique of American overconsumption generated a massive backlash.

Candies of the Halloween season have roots in the sweet treats and real horrors of the Great War.

A striking photo project reveals the maintenance yards, cemeteries, and shipping containers where many of the memorials to white supremacy ended up.

On the robbing of Indigenous graves throughout the 19th-century.

How Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer whose data were crucial to solving the structure of DNA, was written out of the story of scientific discovery.

An introduction to salvage anthropology.

Inside the profession, the battle over the 1619 Project continues.

In the same year as the Salem Witch Trials, a more common and lesser known witch hunt occurred in Stamford, Connecticut.

They’re hip, business-savvy, and know how to cast a spell: How a new generation of witches and warlocks selling $300 wands conquered Salem.

Carving pumpkins, trick-or-treating, and wearing scary costumes are some of the time-honored traditions of Halloween. But why do we do them?