Excerpts

To what extent did the Union general's famous orders actually liberate the enslaved in Texas?

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

On the 100th anniversary of Yuri Kochiyama’s birth and the passage of the Emergency Quota Act, Railton explores inclusion and exclusion in US history.

Tsökahovi Tewanima held an American record in running for decades, but his training at the infamous Carlisle school kept him from his ancestral Hopi lands

A new history charts the radical agitation around Black rights and freedom back to the early nineteenth century. 

Remembering a year of hell and devastation—the year of the Spanish flu.

As a political reporter, I've seen four Republican revolutions — Reagan’s, Gingrich’s, the Tea Party’s and Trump’s — each of which took the party farther right.

Mark Edmundson on the great American poet as a defender of democracy.

A brief history of camping.

In 1838, as the U.S. began its Exploring Expedition to the South Seas, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue.

One hundred years later, it’s time to challenge a long-held bias.

A review of Jon Meacham's newest book and documentary.

People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?

The new note comes 125 years after the free silver movement tried—and failed—to use currency to forge a national identity.

Government support created jobs, built trust, and invigorated American literature. We should try it again.

A forgotten chapter in the history of feminism: why American women chose to flee the West for ‘freedom’ in Soviet Russia.

John Marshall not only owned people; he owned many of them, and aggressively bought them when he could.

A drama about an interracial uprising in colonial Virginia.

Full employment could solve job discrimination and inadequate wages.

VinePair interviewed eight LGBTQ+ archivers around the country about documenting America’s gay and lesbian bars while they still can.

Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.

The Chicago Monuments Project is searching for ways to resolve its landscape of problematic statues and make room for a new, different kind of public memorial.

How African American women represented Black motherhood in the early nineteenth century.

Initially supportive of Belgian King Leopold II’s claim to have created a “free state” of Congo, Williams changed his mind when he saw the horrors of empire.

Commemoration of the 14th Amendment must not display the abundance of freedom, but the hunger for it on both sides of the border.

The $2,500 verdict, the largest ever of its kind, offers evidence of the generational impact such awards can have

Communes, free love, coming out, getting arrested, consciousness-raising rap sessions, gun shooting, acid dropping, and trying to be macrobiotic at McDonald’s.

Historical photographs of early Juneteenth celebrations throughout its home state of Texas and across the country.

The holiday is a reminder of the Civil War's larger meaning, the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction, and the reinforcement of democratic values.

When the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith ran for president, he wasn’t seeking further glory but a policy change in religious liberty.

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past.

Amid all the imperial aspiration, wooly-minded New Age mythologizing, and pure unadulterated commerce, the obelisk stands tall.

Victoria Dailey looks back at Oscar Wilde’s wild ride through the United States in the early 1880s.

Cold War modernists of the title do not seem to be the painters, sculptors, poets, and novelists who produced the original works.

Efforts to combat narcotics and communism militarized the country's security forces.

Local legacy-keepers are working to ensure that the histories aren't lost or forgotten.

In the Texas legislature, Republicans seemed willing to acknowledge systemic racism but resistant to the idea of talking about it with children.

The author of “The Engagement" discusses the activists, politicians, and judicial figures who were at the forefront of the battle over same-sex marriage.

As a teen-ager, Joe Conzo, Jr., took intimate pictures of the Bronx music scene. He’s lived several lives in the time since.

The decades after the Civil War saw mass participation and mass outrage, followed by a period of orderly reform. What can we learn from that era today?

By limiting discussion of the infamous Supreme Court decision, law-school professors risk minimizing the role of racism in American history.

Though the cruelties of the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy were unique, they were part of an American tradition of taking children from parents.

A historian on the unavoidable discomfort around anti-racist education.

While smallpox was ravaging late 18th century Britain, John Haygarth thought up of a plan to pay people for public health compliance.

Some of the same Lexington townspeople who took up arms to fight for freedom on April 19, 1775, were slave owners. And one of them was enslaved.

Eric Hinderaker offers a masterclass in how to peel back the layers of data, scholarship, and propaganda to understand what we call the Boston Massacre.

Following backlash to the construction of a statue for Mary Seacole, Knight describes the connection between nursing and slavery in the US South.

The theory has not provided the clarity some of its early proponents had hoped it would.

John Marshall Harlan's relationship with an enslaved man who grew up in his home showed how respect could transcend barriers and point a path to freedom.

What the 1971 uprising and massacre reveal about our prison system and the liberal democratic state.