Excerpts

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

Learning the right lessons of the past.

All roads lead to Larry Hammond, Justice Lewis Powell’s law clerk at the time.

The child of someone once considered a piece of property instead of a human being, Daniel Smith is a flesh-and-blood reminder that slavery wasn't that long ago

An interview with Sean Wilentz on Library of America's new collection of Richard Hofstadter's works.

How James Baldwin confronted America's most exceptional lie.

Led by A. Philip Randolph, Black Pullman porters secured dignity on the job — and laid the foundation for the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Cornell University's past and current wealth is tied to the dispossession of Indigenous groups from their land.

The story of Indigenous women’s participation in the struggle for women’s suffrage is highly complex, and Zitkala-Ša’s story provides an illuminating example.

How a satirical song mocking uneducated Confederates came to be embraced as an anthem of white Southern pride.

Why are politics so consumed with the past?

The process varied by state, with some making accommodations for the new voting bloc and others creating additional obstacles.

State leaders went to great lengths to instill their gauzy version of the Lost Cause in young minds.

We looked at 271 presidential candidate logos from 1968–2020 to find out how race and gender intersect with color choices.

The House approved a constitutional amendment to dismantle the indirect voting system, but it was killed in the Senate by a filibuster.

On the mythologies behind urban renewal.

The debate between historians and economists over the definition of capitalism, and the legacy of slavery in the structure of today's economy.

Museum visitors, as well as scholars of art, history, and African and Native American studies, discuss the sculpture’s intended and perceived meanings.

Who tells our stories has always mattered.

“This is not just history about Black Americans. This is American history. Slavery is American history. And we want people to understand that.”

A new collection of essays demonstrates how the civil rights icon’s thinking evolved amid the upheavals of the 20th century.

The media must make the long years of organizing as visible as the eruptions and uprisings.

Exploring freedpeople’s struggle against police brutality during Reconstruction.

As we mine the 1940s for alternate visions of international order, we must not presume that the US remains the benevolent center of global politics.

A pair of new books about US Marshal Wyatt Earp are now out. Only one of them shoots straight.

An accomplice of Emmett Till's killers murdered a Black man in a neighboring town, and there were parallels in the trials.

At the height of his powers, the Black Nationalist leader was assassinated, and the government botched the investigation of his murder.

A lethal incident of police brutality in Miami in 1979 offers just one of countless examples of the reality generations of African Americans have faced.

Here’s how the distribution of genres has changed since 1945 up to present.

Debating a modern parable about waste and technology.

A geologist and cartographer dreamed up a captivating, colorful, visually succinct way of representing the river's fluctuations through space and time.

When most people hear the word “punk,” they think of drug addled, nasty behavior. The truth is, it was driven by a visceral hatred for the president.

Fidel Castro's visit to Harlem at the intersection of two themes that shaped the 1960s: the Black freedom struggle and global protest during the Cold War.

Eugene Debs’s unswerving commitment to democracy and internationalism was born out of his revulsion at the tyranny of industrial capitalism.

In 1949, truncheon-wielding police officers descended on the racially integrated concert of singer Paul Robeson.

Descendants of the Pilgrims have highlighted their ancestors’ role in the country’s founding. But their sanitized version of events is only now starting to be told in full.

A response to claims that the First Thanksgiving was not a "thanksgiving" as the Pilgrims understood it.

Is Trump a fascist? You should ask the same question of your local police.

The short-lived radical movement within feminism has gotten a bad reputation for centering white women's experiences. Is that deserved?

How the Civil War-era historian effectively invented a distinctly American tradition of historiography.

What happened to the last million Eastern Europeans in refugee camps in Germany, who refused to return home, or who had no home to return to.

A bill making ethnic studies a graduation requirement for California public-school students is expected to be signed by Governor Newsom.

The forgotten history of Thanksgiving.

How a beloved song with origins in 16th-century Europe captures both a holiday's spirit of unity and a country's legacy of exclusion.

He prized self-control above all, but did not always achieve it.

Fifty years ago, Newark, New Jersey, elected its first Black mayor—Kenneth Gibson—at a moment when there was an urgency to address police violence.

In a recent speech, Trump looks to America's past for answers. However, the history he recounts is glaringly limited.

The two decades leading up to WWII featured numerous connections between America and Nazi Germany that reveal Nazism was never simply a foreign or enemy force.

In Oakland, California, when it comes to Black homelessness and dispossession, dystopia is already here.

Shakespeare's Macbeth and the Federal Theatre Project