Excerpts

Cameron Laux looks at how The Age of Innocence – published 100 years ago – marked a pivotal moment in US history.

Anti-Catholic sentiment in the States gave men like John Riley little reason to continue to pay allegiance to the stars and stripes.

A new show at the National Portrait Gallery spotlights figures including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretia Mott and Margaret Fuller.

Depression-era Americans viewed urban life in America through the lens of Weegee’s camera.

The media myth that demonized a generation of Black youth.

Philadelphia’s PAL and the Black Panther Party’s efforts to mold black youth into their own image.

Reactionary leaders are invoking communism as a way of attacking the left, says author and activist Richard Seymour.

The past has habitually been repurposed in a manner inhibiting ethical accountability in the present.

The forgotten history of how our governments unconstitutionally segregated this country.

The idea of a modern nation is both confusing and conflicting. And as the world confronts the current global health crisis, its weaknesses become more apparent.

The landmark Ken Burns documentary hasn’t aged well. But it continues to shape American perceptions about the Confederacy and slavery.

The young Founder’s evocative account of the tempest inspired people to send him to the Colonies for a formal education.

Federal funding during and after the New Deal ended up hurting cities because of who spent it and how.

In his sweeping new history, the economist systematically demolishes the conceit that extreme inequality is our destiny, rather than our choice.

Sun Ra, a seminal artist of afrofuturism, embraced a unique vision of blackness.

How government commissions became alibis for inaction.

Reforms have only made obstruction the Founders never intended worse.

Historian Elizabeth Catte traces the history and influence of eugenics from her backyard across the country.

In a new study, researchers uncovered female programmers who made important but unrecognized contributions to genetics.

Looking to the local level showcases how women claimed their rights in Early America.

Recognizing that is crucial to ending the violence and the hate driving it.

As we confront rightwing extremism in our own time, the history of American fascist sympathy reveals a legacy worth reckoning with.

Racial justice is now as much a part of the debate as environmentalism vs. oil drilling.

The Carter-Baker report was intended to strengthen Americans’ trust in the electoral process. It’s become a weapon for right-wing attacks on voting rights.

Frances Perkins was the first female Cabinet secretary in U.S. history, paving the way for the record number of women serving in President Biden’s Cabinet.

Technology can break down, but just as often with government tech, glitches are rooted in policy failures.

By blending education and activism, Zonia Baber made geography a means of uniting—not conquering—the globe.

Fannie Lou Hamer is among the sharecroppers interviewed in this unauthorized documentary about the plantation of Dixiecrat James Eastland.

The radical women behind the original “dump him” discourse.

The left regularly dismisses such women as less worthy of recognition.

The peculiarities of how American Christianity took shape help explain believers’ vulnerability to conspiratorial thinking and misinformation.

In the 1970s, social workers in several states placed queer teenagers with queer foster parents, in discrete acts of quiet radicalism.

In 1963, a Black politician named Ben Lewis was shot to death in Chicago. Decades later, it remains no accident authorities never solved the crime.

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.

The role of Red Horse's drawings in the historical narrative of the Battle of Little Bighorn.

A new book shows us the capital region's earliest years through the eyes and the experiences of leaders like Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth Keckley.

Muir's romantic vision obscured Indigenous ownership of the land—but a new generation is pulling away the veil.

The US imperialist wars in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan grew from US wars against Indigenous people in the 19th century.

Who needs a public health system when sickness is a personal failure?

What an old poem says about the search for justice following the Capitol riot.

Why it’s foolish to think the modern GOP will ever break with its lunatic fringe.

Emilio Sanchez and the British government fought the lucrative business as American authorities looked the other way.

Redlining itself cannot explain this persistence of inequality in America's cities.

Black civil-rights activists—and especially Black women—delivered on the promise of the Founding. Their victories are in peril.

An activist, writer, doctor and intellectual, James McCune Smith, born enslaved, directed his talents to the eradication of slavery.

From the beginning, International Women's Day has been an occasion to celebrate working women and fight capitalism.

The children’s author’s early works have been finding a new audience among those opposed to the "America First" policies of President Trump.

The modern GOP isn't the first party to embrace huge conspiracies. But the lessons should be sobering.

Long before Southern Democrats filibustered Civil Rights legislation, “filibusteros” were conquering slave territories for the United States.

While American conservatism remains largely White, it has slowly but surely become less so.