Excerpts

Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform was supposed to move needy families off government handouts and onto a path out of poverty. How has it turned out?

Colin Kaepernick continues a long tradition of athletes using their celebrity to protest America's racial inequality.

A case from almost a decade ago reveals the peril faced by whistleblowers seeking to expose wrongdoing.

From the 1930s to the 1950s a radical surgery -- the lobotomy -- would forever change our understanding and treatment of the mentally ill.

Today, despite their mixed record, private prison companies are overseeing the vast majority of undocumented migrants.

In the 1990s, a handful of researchers inspired panic with a dire but flawed prediction: the imminent arrival of a new breed of “superpredators.”

Unfair maneuver or a strong warning to would-be criminals?

Stella Liebeck was vilified when she was awarded millions after spilling McDonald's coffee in her lap. But the facts told another story.

Anger over policing and inequality boiled over more than 50 years ago, and a landmark report warned that it could happen again.

Politics, public health and a pandemic. What we didn’t learn from HIV.

Dr. Larry Brilliant, who helped eradicate smallpox, says past epidemics can teach us to fight coronavirus.

Retro Report explores decades of conspiracy theories -- from the John F. Kennedy assassination to Pizzagate -- and what they can tell us about the world today.

Decades after Dr. Jonas Salk opposed patenting the polio vaccine, the pharmaceutical industry has changed.

Sixty-six years ago, people celebrated the polio vaccine by embracing in the streets. Our vaccine story is both more extraordinary and more complicated.

Vaccination is of critical importance right now. History shows us that our problems are nothing new.

'The Man Who Lived Underground,' newly expanded from a story into a novel by the Library of America, may revise the seminal Black author's reputation.

The famed abolitionist’s father, Ben Ross, sheltered her and family on the Eastern Shore in the 1840s.

A new history of the Cuban missile crisis emphasizes how close the world came to destruction—and how severe a threat the weapons still pose.

After the Soviet Union sent the first human safely into orbit, the U.S. government doubled down on its effort to win the race to the moon.

How the disaster energized the nascent environmental movement and led to a slew of legislative changes.

In the heat of the Cold War, Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade became a media sensation.

In the Cold War, North Korean Communists invaded South Korea. President Truman’s decision to intervene had consequences that shape the world today.

The terms meaning has shifted throughout Christianity’s long history, making it difficult to define.

Confronting a long tradition of projecting fantasies onto the South Bronx.

The Supreme Court has refused to force White Americans to confront history.

The history of unarmed police brutality is rooted in anti-Blackness.

Trying to learn more about a woman named Ann led her descendants to confront a painful past; ‘I just wanted to know the truth.’

The conflict between commercialization and historic preservation.

Kevin Dann on the spiritualists of New York City and beyond.

Despite extensive historiography, most people are not aware that the Society of Jesus owned people.

A documentary about an extraordinary hidden treasure and the reclusive soul that protected it for years.

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.

After emancipation, prison labor replaced slavery as a way for white Southerners to enforce a racial hierarchy.

Jonathan W. Wilson offers a constructively critical review of Wilfred McClay's American history textbook "Land of Hope."

The former first lady fought the conservative Reagan administration in an attempt to get her husband to pay more attention to the deadly pandemic.

For centuries, settlers pushed Natives off the land. But they continued to use indigenous language to name, describe, and anoint the world around them.

How an automated algorithm constrained Congress for a century.

Hollywood was just fine avoiding all portrayals of the Central Intelligence Agency for years after the agency's founding in 1947.

The 1918 influenza pandemic had a profound impact on how librarians do their work, transforming libraries into centers of community care.

A signee of the U.S. Constitution, John Dickinson enslaved as many as 59 men, women and children at one time.

Dance marathons were essentially the Netflix dating show of the Great Depression.

The police are an insulated political institution within cities empowered to enforce a racialized social order.

America’s first opioid crisis came after its bloodiest war, but the lessons of the original debacle have been lost in history.

On the legal foundations that spurred centuries of civil rights movements.

The debate among American Christians over globalism and nationalism is nothing new — rather, it has been going on for decades.

For years, the West has relied on so-called 'chop suey' fonts to communicate "Asianness" in food packaging, posters and ad campaigns.

How the myth of the overburdened white taxpayer was made.

An experiment in oral history of the present.

The wildly popular books helped people understand farming and health through the movement of the planets, in a way compatible with Protestantism.

Meet Boston Corbett, the self-castrated hatmaker who was John Wilkes Booth's Jack Ruby.