Excerpts

With an eye toward U.S. power, Americans spread the sport making its Olympic debut.

The conservative hysteria over critical race theory is a refusal to acknowledge that American schools have always taught a white-centric view of U.S. history.

Conflict between American settlers/revolutionaries and the Cherokee nation erupted in the early years of the Revolution.

Those who claim that vaccine resistance is an expression of liberty are historically illiterate.

How public interest groups inadvertently aided the right’s ascendency.

Banning such teaching isn’t colorblind; it would erase Black people from history and maintain White cultural dominance.

Do we give the activist groups of the 1960s more credit than they deserve?

The late civil-rights leader understood that grassroots organizing was key to delivering political power to Black Americans in the South.

Her memoirs contribute to the inaccurate post-Civil War memory of the Southern plantation.

Dick Gregory was an activist, comedian, and trendsetter for Black vegans.

Leading conservative pundits today are pounding themes that were popular among opponents of Reconstruction.

One of the most audacious examples of product placement at the Olympics was staged by John Carlos and Tommie Smith.

The common denominator? Fear of Black liberation.

The great discoveries of the age captivated Poe’s imagination. He almost always misunderstood them.

An artist-activist catalogues the physical remnants of 'segregation walls,' unassuming bits of racist infrastructure that hide in plain sight in neighborhoods.

We do our children no favors if we only feed them a steady diet of fairy tales that sidestep life’s complexities.

A new history charts the forgotten ways the social politics of the Roosevelt years transformed the United States.

Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology.

“Wherever there is race reform, there’s inevitably retrenchment.”

Learning the history of Mexico can help Americans better understand themselves.

The women of the historic Ninth Street Show had a will of iron and an intense need for their talent to be expressed, no matter the cost.

Key events in the relationship between the two nations, as compiled by The Onion.

"By not showing up in American history, by not hearing about Asian Americans in schools, that contributes to that sense of foreignness."

Hollywood has long abused conservatorships. I spent the past decade studying one of the darkest cases.

We’re capturing the mundane as well as the memorable.

How a book of essays from 1964 explains what happened at the Capitol.

During WWII, American soldiers brought the flags home as a remembrance. Now, family members and historians must decide what should become of them.

Time capsules unearthed at affordable housing sites offer alternative, lost, and otherwise obscured histories.

In 1955, just past daybreak, a Chevrolet truck pulled up to an unmarked building. A 14-year-old child was in the back.

There is no American history without the histories of Indigenous and enslaved peoples. And this past has consequences today.

On the eve of America’s Bicentennial, a mysterious illness terrifies the country and sends disease detectives racing the clock to find answers.

Twenty years ago my hometown made national headlines when the local college staged an internationally acclaimed play about gay men and the AIDS crisis.

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it.

How Hannah Arendt’s fans misread the post-truth presidency.

The relationship between enslaved women and the Revolutionary war.

A behind-the-scenes look at Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

The recent ProPublica exposé shows we need to attack the wealth and power of the rich — and that means massively increasing taxes on them.

On the utopian origins of Dilbert's workspace.

Even as they tell others’ stories, historians often write about their own lives.

The 240-year-old journal of John Claypoole, a Revolutionary War POW and later the third husband of Betsy Ross, sheds light on the flagmaker.

Lora Webb Nichols created and collected some twenty-four thousand negatives documenting life in her small town.

Early Americans conscripted the universe into their nation-building project.

Records tell the story of the decline of the patriarchy, marrying young, and pandemic fallout. Digitizing the data could reveal even richer tales.

History classes made it seem like young girls wouldn't ever change the course of the world. These books taught them that they could.

A leftist response to the 1936 Games being held in Nazi Germany, the proposed competition was canceled by the Spanish Civil War.

What, exactly, does history lose when an archive-worthy text is destroyed?

If your entire collection is on a streaming service, good luck accessing it in 10 or 20 years.

Anthony Comstock’s crusade against vice constrained the lives of ordinary Americans. His antagonists opened up history for feminists and other activists.

The causes were many, but police brutality and economic insecurity were supercharged in Los Angeles after the 1984 Olympics. 

While we're missing three weeks of sporting endeavors due to the Tokyo Olympics, we can revisit one of the most bizarre races in modern Olympic history.