Excerpts

Pulitzer-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed reflects on the battle for the past and the fragile state of American democracy.

America's suggestions for handling the Waco standoff, as found in FBI FOIA files.

In 1921, twenty thousand armed miners in West Virginia marched on the coal bosses and were met with bombs and submachine guns.

The rise of optical illusions and magical effects.

Utopia Parkway, which slices through the most diverse borough in New York, began as a dream of cooperative housing for poor Jewish immigrants.

It’s time for something better.

If we accept that we live in a desert nation, we can glean insights about how to live with aridity.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. and Russia have used marine mammals to further their military objectives, sparking protest from animal rights activists.

"What makes this conspiracy theory so damaging is its adaptability."

How did a radical social activist, killed for his politics, become the figurehead of capitalist and imperial power?

Once a haven for tuberculosis patients, Barlow Respiratory Hospital is uniquely suited to the COVID and post-COVID eras.

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

Everyday people's creation of porn and erotic objects over the centuries.

The battles over Critical Race Theory and Southern heritage are really about a narrow, exclusionary reading of our past.

After 20 years of foreign policy failures following the attacks on the World Trade Center, America is finally rethinking its place in the world.

The nation’s poverty and chaos has been shaped by Washington for decades.

The 13-year old Cox confronted Jim Crow when she traveled to the nation's capital to compete in the 1936 National Spelling Bee.

Making sense of current fights over a word we borrowed from the French long ago.

Colonial planners saw Nova Scotia as a blank space ripe for transformation.

Who made sure Henry David Thoreau's works came out after his death? His sister.

Five men sat together on a hillside in the late afternoon, imagining a world in which they did not have to hide.

On the rise and fall of radium in the beauty industry.

Variations in the legend of a steel-driving man tell us about differing American views of the value and purpose of work.

The most complete account we are likely to get of the deceptions and duplicities that led to war leaves some crucial mysteries unsolved.

The history of rural electrification demonstrates why vital public utilities cannot be left to the machinations of the market.

For centuries, everyone from archaeologists to amateurs pillaged artifacts — and human remains. Now, the FBI is cracking down on those who continue to dig.

The bones of enslaved furnace workers tell the grim story of their lives.

In our flattened historical imagination, pictures of atrocity and those of progress can coincide in unsettling ways.

Emily Dickinson and the woman in her orbit.

Without New York Times vs. Sullivan, freedom of speech and the press could be drastically truncated.

Ulysses S. Grant was overlooked by historians and underestimated by contemporaries. H.W. Brands reevaluates Grant’s presidency.

In the 60s and 70s, spiraling prices for staples like meat and gasoline wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy, thanks to political and policy mistakes.

Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

Indigenous nations are spearheading a movement to restore buffalo to the American landscape.

The assassination of the president is part of a pattern that undermines democracy.

A new book shows how southern evangelicals looked to the Bible to justify their opposition to racial integration.

After the assassination of the Haitian president, the U.S. should avoid old patterns of interference.

The rise and fall of the iconic sandwich has paralleled changes in Americans' economic conditions.

The Trumpist wing of the GOP uses history as a bludgeon, without regard to context, logic, or proportionality.

In the decades after the Civil War, Black Americans warned of the dangers of Confederate monuments.

Fearful of increasing participation, elites of the era attempted to rein in democracy.

The more sons a Founding Father had, the more supportive he was of a strong centralized government.

Revisiting America's first witch hunt — and discovering how much of it was a family affair. My family, that is.

The “border” is not a line on the ground, but a tool that enables violence and surveillance.

Black archivists, activists, and artists are fighting for justice and ethical remembrance — and reimagining the archive itself.

Today, the legendary deputy U.S. marshal is widely believed to be the real Lone Ranger. But his true legacy is even greater.

Decades of stigmatizing and trying to police the homeless have perpetuated the problem.

Revolutionary Americans adopted native snakes as symbols for their cause. Why?

A New Deal program to restore Totem Poles in Alaska provided jobs and boosted tourism, but it ignored their history and significance within Native culture.