Excerpts

How a clown won over several generations of children.

Repeated failures by both political parties to get a decent policy through our 18th-century constitutional structure led to the Affordable Care Act.

A blinking cursor follows us everywhere in the digital world, but who invented it and why?

How 19th century slave traders used, and reused, the brig named Uncas.

Seeing the war from the perspective of citizens of U.S. colonies sheds new light on the impact of World War II.

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.

Bodybuilding is routinely presented as the very apex of male heterosexuality—but its history is a bit gayer than you might think.

The show never took a singular position on social issues. The point was to wrestle with the story itself in hopes of sparking self-awareness and contemplation.

The United States confined 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. They’re still pushing for redress.

How a sitting, elected national government found itself in the position of having to buy its own country.

CB radio was portrayed as a mostly white enthusiasm in its heyday, but Black CB users were active as early as 1959.

The actor who played the loveable grocer found his way to Sesame Street after being blacklisted during the Red Scare.

The challenges of 536 CE, including cold temperatures and volcanic fallout, prompted a flourishing of Ancestral Pueblo society.

167 Black soldiers were dishonorably discharged from the army in 1906. Two Angelenos corrected the historical record in the 1970s.

Tens of thousands of sick and injured soldiers became addicted.

Sheryll Cashin’s “White Space, Black Hood” shows how economic discrimination combines with racial injustice in America’s housing policy.

The former Republican leader played a key role in the Americans With Disabilities Act but stuck with the GOP as the party turned its back on the law.

Elizabeth Samet argues that an idealized narrative of America’s actions in World War II has colored our beliefs about warfare in detrimental ways.

ONE is a vital archive, but its focus on citizenship and “rational acceptance” ultimately blocked it from being the safe home for all that it claimed to be.

In his lifetime, Robert Welch toiled in the mocked and marginal fringe. Today his ideas are the mainstream of the American right.

There are more than 400 million guns in Americans' hands.

Discrimination and mistranslation have long obscured the dish's true origins.

On the origins, use, and abuse of mugshots.

The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it.

A brief history on land ownership, valuation and development in the City of Richmond and the maps used to destroy black communities.

Before presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, before Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, there was Congresswoman and firebrand Bella Abzug.

A century ago, the most effective school-ban campaign in American history set the pattern: noise and fear, but not much change in what schools actually teach.

This isn’t the first time a House committee has investigated political violence in the Capitol.

When medicine and journalism defeated cholera.

The Texas Rangers were vicious enforcers of white power. J.T. Canales, who once fought against them lost, but the reckoning he sought is finally underway.

George III was a model monarch, whose reputation finally deserves rehabilitation a quarter of a millennium later.

The historian Allen C. Guelzo believes that the Confederate general deserves a more compassionate reading.

The history of WD-40, a chemical substance with an unusual origin story and a rust-fighting ability that has become a standby of workbenches the world over.

Distributing them equally is key to defeating the coronavirus.

Tens of thousands of Indigenous people labored in bondage across the western United States in the 1800s.

A brief history of the Yuletide in America.

A comparison of the "Lost Cause" narratives from the Confederacy and Mexico's side of the Mexican-American War.

Mississippi may be the nation’s most religious state, but it is also far more complex and dynamic than many commentators admit.

Many Southern Baptists in the 1970s supported abortion rights and gender equality. What happened?

David Gunn’s murder was the first targeted killing of an abortion doctor in America. His killer now has an opportunity for parole.

Trump spends so much time defending statues not because he cares about history, but precisely because he doesn’t

When LL Cool J sat for his portrait, he found common ground with the life-long philanthropical endeavors of John D. Rockefeller.

The 1993 song reinvigorated the rap legend’s career — and against all odds became a Hollywood (and police) favorite

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama?

The project's editor falsifies the history of American history-writing, openly embracing the privileging of “narrative” over “actual fact.”

Photos reveal how people structured their living rooms before the television became widespread.

With its doctrine of fairness, A Theory of Justice transformed political philosophy. But what did it leave out? 

The history of anti-racial justice rhetoric.

In 1741, the Royal Academy of Sciences held a contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results show how Enlightenment thinkers justified slavery.

Decades before Thoreau's famous experiment, a community of formerly enslaved men and women had a much different experience of life in the woods.