Excerpts

Why efforts to curb the cruelty of military force may have backfired.

Historian Davarian Baldwin explains how universities have come to wield the kind of power that were once hallmarks of ruthless employers in company towns.

Fissures in the feminist movement should not be buried as signs of failure but worked through as opportunities for insight.

A linguistic trajectory of Puerto Rico's identity as the world’s oldest colony.

Border wall construction is encroaching on a site where people from many cultures have interacted for thousands of years.

By offering the group as a model for present-day politics, Sarah Schulman’s history of ACT UP reproduces the movement’s failures and exclusions.

Understanding how the National Park Service Director is chosen is important for understanding the current state of our national parks system.

On race, borders and belonging.

If the press didn’t know what to make of Miss America 1992 Carolyn Sapp, they really didn’t know what to make of domestic violence.

On the anniversary of Booker T. Washington’s historic Atlanta speech, we look back at the rare 1908 recording so that his words would not be lost to history.

At a recent commemoration of the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, songs of struggle took center stage.

The pawpaw is finding champions again after colonizers' dismissal, increasing globalization and economic needs.

Today's centrists are a hot mess.

A brief history of trying to save city streets from pet waste.

Computers were supposed to reduce office labor. They accomplished the opposite.

Hispanic women and the fight for the 19th Amendment in New Mexico.

Two new books on the history of feminism emphasize global grassroots efforts and the influence of American women labor leaders on international agreements.

Historians have demonstrated how central racism has been to the formation of the U.S. But many of those same ideas have also been vital to combating white supremacy.

It basically started the wave of activism that revived the left—and taught people to get serious about power.

Anti-federalist Luther Martin's agenda failed at the Constitutional Convention, but his criticisms of the Founders may still resonate with us today.

The history of education battles — from fights over evolution to critical race theory — shows why the country’s divisions are growing sharper.

Bipartisanship might not be dead. But it is on life support. And it’s long past time we pulled the plug.

As convenient as it might be to blame the filibuster on the famous defender of slavery, the historical record is much messier.

Sexless, impersonal academic approaches tell us little about the lived experiences of the LGBT community.

John C. Calhoun knew what a strong federal government might do.

The president has skillfully played up his Irish roots, but the story of his ancestry is more complicated.

Slave ships and colonial plantations created environments that enabled doctors to study how diseases spread.

New media meets old.

When President Nixon launched the war on drugs in 1971, it set off a bloody chain reaction in Mexico as new documents reveal.

The pygmy mammoth only lived on California's Channel Islands, and was half the size of its Columbian mammoth ancestor.

On the therapeutic turn in Indigenous politics.

Nobody was listening, so she brought some rocks.

In the documentary "Fire Music," the hostile reaction that met the unusual genre soon turns into deep appreciation and a lasting influence.

The history of patrolling sex in public.

William Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen’s case for reparations.

As a biographer, Jacqueline Jones found herself wondering how she should deal with aspects of her subject’s life that left her baffled, even mystified.

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were regarded as the video games or TikTok of their age — shallow, addictive, and dangerous.

After real estate agents invented racial covenants in the early 1900s, L.A. led the nation in using them. Their idea of 'freedom' shapes the U.S. today.

As African Americans achieved economic success in Atlanta in the early 1900s, the city simmered with racial strife that was further spread by yellow journalism.

Critics of Black Lives Matter have held up King as a foil to the movement’s criticisms of law enforcement, but those are views that King himself shared.

The massive U.S. apparatus for holding immigrants has a long American tradition.

In the 1920s, radio was an exciting new mass medium. It was known for providing entertainment, but educators wondered if it could also be used for education.

In 1956, Elvis Presley was vaccinated backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show in order to encourage teenagers to get the polio vaccination.

A wide-ranging conversation with the philosopher on the white supremacist roots of liberal thought, Biden’s victory, and Trumpism without Trump.

In 1969, a group of Puerto Rican youth in East Harlem leveraged a garbage problem to demand reform.

Even before the United States regulated migration, states did. Here’s why.

The author of ‘Founding Brothers’ tries to capture the breadth of the War for Independence in a single narrative.

The Legacy Museum lands at a time when racial violence is on the rise and critical race theory is used to prevent America’s racist past being taught in schools.

In 2011, a grassroots anticapitalist movement galvanized people with its slogan “We are the 99 percent.” It changed me, and others, but did it change the world?

A six-hour workday could have become the national standard during the Great Depression. Here's the story of why that didn't happen.