Excerpts

Biden’s assistance to William Casey, Reagan’s CIA director, and the rehabilitation of the intelligence service in general has had tragic consequences.

In Guatemala, the CIA hired an American actor and two radio DJs to oust a president.

In 1872, Charles Sumner decries “a president who makes his great office a plaything and perquisite.”

The Popular Front and American culture.

It’s not just “Cinco De Drinko,” and it isn’t Mexican Independence Day.

Pete Seeger, William F. Buckley, Jr., and public history.

The first in a series of posts to offer evidence casting doubt on the view that New Deal programs ended the Great Depression.

Despite Freedom of Information requests throughout the years, New York still will not release records to the public.

The Puritans had little tolerance for those who didn't conform to their vision of the world.

Entangled with, yet critical of, colonial oppression and the evils of slavery, the true history of Boston can now be told.

A photo archive shows college coeds vacuuming, preparing baby bottles, diapering babies, and generally practicing at motherhood.

The Texan secessionists are at it again.

The measure of thermal energy expended by exercise was adapted from the study of explosives and engines.

How midlife crises—and menopause—came to be defined by the experience of men.

Gangs and mafiosos have a long history with food crime.

Responding to “Race and the Paradoxes of the Night,” by Celeste Henery.

Neoliberals refashioned the idea of freedom by tying it to the free market, and turning it into a weapon to be used against anticolonial projects worldwide.

Two decades of activism and scholarship have led to critical self-examination.

The 1968 Gun Control Act had the right idea — but it came too late.

The fate of Aaron Burr's daughter remains a topic of contention.

A 1918 debate offers a portrait of the challenges facing local officials during a health emergency.

Richard Russell was a segregationist and a fervent opponent of civil rights. So why does his name still adorn the Russell Senate Office Building?

Globalism is out. Nationalism is in. Progressives who think they can jump aboard are dangerously naive.

Roger Mudd proved in 1964 that media attention can help overcome Senate obstruction.

In 1948, the landfill at Fresh Kills was marketed to Staten Island as a stopgap measure. No one guessed that it would remain open for more than half a century.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a wave of women rethought what journalism could say, sound like, and do. Why were they forgotten?

Non-fungible tokens and artificial intelligence make tracing the origins of a digital object more fragile. What are the world’s archivists to do?

In 1911, the Dillingham Commission set a half-century precedent for screening out 'undesirable' newcomers.

The Founders terrorized and exterminated Native Americans instead of learning from them.

While the Panthers have become a staple of pop culture, veteran members of the group remain invisible.

A century of failed liberal attempts at policing reform in Minneapolis suggests that none of the city’s current proposals will prevent another George Floyd.

The path to equality in the free Northern states was inconceivably steep. But in time, the movement maneuvered from the margins into mainstream politics.

When professor Norman E. Himes published The Medical History of Contraception in 1936, he had made a tactical move, to legalize birth control.

Until the Covid-19 pandemic, the catastrophe of the Spanish flu had been dropped from American memory.

History suggests that a more discreet American presence in Afghanistan will be a provocation rather than a source of security.

A new book presents an expansive vision of soul music.

The Cold War may be over, but an arms race continues, even as safeguards once in place have fallen away.

It's worth considering how the two images of the beaver – one focused upon its hind parts and the other upon its industry – are but two acts in a single history.

The Amazon CEO's vision of space settlements draws on 1970s thinking, without adding anything new.

Undocumented Black migrants struggle to have their asylum rights recognized in the United States. Groups have been asking President Biden to stop deportations.

For the great American poet, the peculiar qualities of grass suggested a way to resolve the tension between the individual and the group.

Orisanmi Burton reflects on the legacy of the Panther 21 on the 50th anniversary (to the day) of their acquittal.

When germ theory displaced the idea of "miasmas" we lost important knowledge about tackling airborne disease.

The domestic slave trade was no sideshow in our history, and slave traders were not bit players on the stage.

A group of activists is calling attention to the legacy of slavery encoded in the names of New York City’s streets and neighborhoods.

Conservatives have weaponized Americans’ desire to help to attack the social safety net.

Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan grappled with the contradictions of a role that is at once public and private, superficial and serious.

Joe Biden has met with scholars to discuss his presidency and likely legacy—but what are we to make of his special relationship with historian Jon Meacham?

Family blessings are a curse, or they can be. The life of Henry Adams explained in his book Education.

In 1970, an image of a dead protester at Kent State became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?