Excerpts

In 1955, just past daybreak, a Chevrolet truck pulled up to an unmarked building. A 14-year-old child was in the back.

There is no American history without the histories of Indigenous and enslaved peoples. And this past has consequences today.

On the eve of America’s Bicentennial, a mysterious illness terrifies the country and sends disease detectives racing the clock to find answers.

Twenty years ago my hometown made national headlines when the local college staged an internationally acclaimed play about gay men and the AIDS crisis.

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it.

How Hannah Arendt’s fans misread the post-truth presidency.

The relationship between enslaved women and the Revolutionary war.

A behind-the-scenes look at Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

The recent ProPublica exposé shows we need to attack the wealth and power of the rich — and that means massively increasing taxes on them.

On the utopian origins of Dilbert's workspace.

Even as they tell others’ stories, historians often write about their own lives.

The 240-year-old journal of John Claypoole, a Revolutionary War POW and later the third husband of Betsy Ross, sheds light on the flagmaker.

Lora Webb Nichols created and collected some twenty-four thousand negatives documenting life in her small town.

Early Americans conscripted the universe into their nation-building project.

Records tell the story of the decline of the patriarchy, marrying young, and pandemic fallout. Digitizing the data could reveal even richer tales.

History classes made it seem like young girls wouldn't ever change the course of the world. These books taught them that they could.

A leftist response to the 1936 Games being held in Nazi Germany, the proposed competition was canceled by the Spanish Civil War.

What, exactly, does history lose when an archive-worthy text is destroyed?

If your entire collection is on a streaming service, good luck accessing it in 10 or 20 years.

Anthony Comstock’s crusade against vice constrained the lives of ordinary Americans. His antagonists opened up history for feminists and other activists.

The causes were many, but police brutality and economic insecurity were supercharged in Los Angeles after the 1984 Olympics. 

While we're missing three weeks of sporting endeavors due to the Tokyo Olympics, we can revisit one of the most bizarre races in modern Olympic history.

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.