Excerpts

What the history of a gesture can tell us about Black creative power.

What I learned about American power watching the U.S. leave Vietnam — and then Afghanistan decades later.

There were Munich-style dark lagers, American bocks, and paler, pilsner-like beers.

Twenty years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the museum is still struggling to address the legacy of those events.

Two new books argue that the War on Terror changed American politics, but what if the sources of its violence were already long present in the country?

The way we commemorate those who have made the ultimate sacrifice dates to the Civil War.

For decades, “common sense” has been a convenient framing for conservative ideas. The label hides a more complicated picture.

The rhetoric about abortion being the catalyst for the rise of the Religious Right collapses under scrutiny.

A deluge of new findings are challenging long-held scientific narratives of how humans came to North and South America.

Did people first come to this continent by land or by sea?

What role should the federal government play in building our infrastructure?

These men, who had sacrificed so much for the country, faced racist attacks in 1946 as they laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement to come.

Hitchcock and Herwig discuss their findings on the teaching of war in higher education.

The idea of history’s judgment was, and remains, seductive. Yet this notion cannot withstand scrutiny, as Joan Wallach Scott’s On the Judgment of History shows.

A warning from September 2001 about government overreach in the name of national security.

In 1905, the high court made a fateful ruling with eerie parallels to today: One person’s liberty can’t trump everyone else’s.

For more than a century, U.S. wars of invasion have claimed a humanitarian mantle.

When City Radio opened on NYC's Cortlandt Street in 1921, radio was a novelty. Over the next few decades, hundreds of stores popped up in the neighborhood.

The idealistic presidential candidate was on the verge of seizing control of the 1968 race just as Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet struck.

Remembered as symbols of strength after 9/11, the Twin Towers and their Japanese American architect were once criticized in racist and sexist terms.

After 9/11, hundreds of pieces of steel debris were catalouged. Much of it ended up in small municipal memorials and in other locations around the country.

Historically, the failures and limitations of federal policy have emboldened activists.

After decades of keeping her identity a secret, Jane Roe’s child has chosen to talk about her life.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the making of 9/11.

From the beginning, the War on Terror merged red-hot vengeance with calculated opportunism. Millions are still paying the price.

Should 9/11 remembrances include the global war on terror?

What the youngest cohort of American voters thinks about politics, fear and the potential of the country they’ve grown up in.

Dress codes are about social control, not student wellbeing.

If this nation hopes to achieve a justice system that is just, it must remain ever vigilant for any echo from Attica.

The books of the last two decades show how overreacting to the attacks unmade America’s values.

Transnational networks have long helped pregnant people navigate treatment options.

The US suffered grave losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t mistake revisions of US military strategy for a turn away from imperialist ambitions.

The Magnum photographer looks back on capturing an “inconceivable event.”

Today, drowning rates are disproportionately high among Black children. What’s being done?

How the turn toward “precision” combat promoted endless war.

Confronting the violence of U.S. policing requires an international perspective.

"My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.”

As Progressive Era reforms increased the power of government, organized opposition to vaccination campaigns took on a new life.

A review of “West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire."

In the gold-rush era, ceremonial greetings swiftly gave way to bigotry and violence.

At first, it was all about hauling things we needed. Then the vehicle itself became the thing we wanted.

A top White House aide recounts her experiences that day.

In the wake of 9/11, some called for rounding up whole groups of people but Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta knew the U.S. had done that before.

On Pete Souza’s Obama.

Conspiracy theories like QAnon are ultimately a social problem rather than a cognitive one. We should blame politics, not the faulty reasoning of individuals.

What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?

First responders who survived 9/11 don’t want the day to be forgotten.

How antebellum women prevented themselves from getting pregnant during an era when their identity was founded on being a mother.

A brief history of self-induced abortion.

From the colonial period to the end of the US Civil War, the rattlesnake sssssssymbolized everything from evil to unity and power.