Excerpts

At the intersection of gender and racial discrimination, Black widows struggled to get the compensation they deserved.

The career and legacy of a Black critic who argued for the elevation of Black performance.

On the nostalgic and technophobic motives of the recent boom in suburban fantastic media.

The forgotten history of Soviet-American vaccine diplomacy.

In the nineteenth century, laws in many parts of the country prohibited "undeserving" disabled people from appearing in public.

America’s ambivalence about labor is nothing new. In the colonial era the ruling class had nothing but contempt for anything that could be justly called "work."

A new documentary goes inside the battles that have riven the institution and shaped the historical legacy of the attack.

Seventy years after the UN Refugee Convention, the United States should refresh its commitment to displaced people.

My questions about my grandmother's death – from a self-induced abortion – haven’t changed since I was 12. What feels new is the urgency of her story.

Far from ushering in a zero-waste world, the switch from returnables to recycling provided cover for the creation of ever more packaging trash.

MTV's 1981 broadcast was advertised to be as important as the moon landing.

Players, fans and authors recall the landmark 1971 starting nine.

A review of "Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America."

For women who play sports, there's often no way to win.

Celebrations of multiculturalism obscure the country’s settler colonial history—and the role that immigrants play in perpetuating it.

The discovery of oil and gas made members of the Osage Nation among the richest people in the world. But it also made them targets for exploitation.

But the evidence never backed it up before, and it doesn’t support such claims today either.

The U.S. can’t win wars for countries.

DNA testing kits have shifted the way both researchers and the public think about race and identity. This shift is evident in the 2020 U.S. Census data.

It’s a story of U.S. misdeeds, but also Native resilience.

We have no historical precedent for this moment.

Half a world away, the citizens of two nations suffer at the hands of a familiar malefactor.

Consolidation aimed to bring cutting-edge reforms to rural schools. Instead, it hurt kids and communities.

An account of the long-lasting effects of nuclear energy in the US.

During WWI the act of hearing was recast as a tactical activity — one that could determine human and even national survival.

Its legacy lives on today in the struggles faced by modern miners seeking workers' rights.

Or, a lost freedom story I found while looking for something else.

On the roads and seas miners traveled to reach gold in the United States and Australia.

Billy Bass might be considered mere kitsch, but dismissing this singing fish would ignore some critical linkages between culture and environment.

It’s hardly a secret, but, for a land that bills itself as a land of freedom and opportunity, America can be inhospitable to just about anyone.

A Louisiana tribe’s long fight against the American tide.

Why Americans living in uncertain times bought so many sensational images of shipwrecks and fires.

And the lone forecaster who predicted its deadly path.

The long history of the international olympic committee's war on athletes' free expression.

I spent 600 hours listening in on the people who now run Afghanistan. It wasn’t until the end of my tour that I understood what they were telling me.

'In God We Trust' became the national motto of the US on July 30, 1956. Since then, it has been used to forward a conservative Christian agenda.

"I get teary-eyed with my students."

Was cartoonist Billy Ireland’s pen really mightier than the burning crosses of the KKK?

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, political activism was full of empty gestures done in bad faith. Abolition called for true heroism.

Early Americans coped with disease through narratives that found divine providence and mercy in suffering.

Liberty for some has always entailed a lack of liberty for many others.

Eighty years after a segregation wall rose in Detroit, America remains divided. That's not an accident.

An Oval Office photograph captured the bizarre encounter between the king of rock and roll and the president.

The comment section of a Grateful Dead concert archive offers a sometimes-dark glimpse into a dedicated fan community.

The New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll on the humanitarian catastrophe that is now likely to engulf Afghan civilians, and how Joe Biden is shifting the blame.

Wilson became a great supporter of the 19th Amendment, but only because he worked alongside a woman who spoke his language.

Officials who drove the decades-long war in Afghanistan look back on the strategic errors and misjudgments that led to a 20-year quagmire.

History offers a guide for why the American project in Afghanistan went wrong — and for the future of foreign engagement in the country.

Sarah Chayes describes her experiences in Afghanistan and who's to blame for the problems today.

What’s new about the controversy over the Alamo’s history, and how the way Texans tell its story relates to how Americans see each other.