Excerpts

The vagrancy law regime regulated so much more than what is generally considered “vagrancy.”

On the 75th anniversary of the A-bomb, a Japanese-American writer speaks to one of the last living survivors.

The New York-to-Washington train had 21 cars, 700 passengers—and millions of trackside mourners.

A desire to fish created an epic 1889 flood.

Instead of caring for Black children, child welfare systems subject them to abuse and harsh conditions.

An excerpt from a discussion between Malcolm X and Robert Penn Warren on guilt and innocence.

The first edition of the beloved novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory featured "pygmy" characters taken from Africa.

How activists fought to create LGBTQ+ pride.

How the objects in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia can help us understand today's prejudice and racial violence.

To preserve Black history, a 19th-century archivist filled hundreds of scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and other materials.

What Milton Bradley started.

The beloved line of fictional characters taught children about American history and encouraged them to realize their potential.

Ann Banks on the history of her father's Civil War seal and her family's past connection to the Confederacy.

Remembering Asian-American activists Corky Lee and Yuri Kochiyama.

Life across the United States in 1880.

What haunts the land? When two artists dig up the tangled history of slavery and soil exhaustion in Maryland, soil memory reveals ongoing racial violence.

His blazing rendition at Woodstock still echoes throughout the years, reminding us of what is worth fighting for in the American experiment.

The Biden administration’s proposed “child allowances” draw on the feminist thought of Crystal Eastman, who advocated “motherhood endowments” 100 years ago.

Martha Saxton dives into the life of the mother of George Washington and how historians have misrepresented her in the past.

Understanding how inflation came to be a mainstay in modern economics.

A look at the evolution of the prison system in California.

At E. 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, a self-organizing network explores what it means to construct and maintain a public memorial.

A new book recovers long-suppressed alternative politics.

The story of one small Maryland town that became the Marriage Capital of the East Coast in the 20th century.

Why the rifles jammed.

Patsy Sims reflects on her interview with the man who was instrumental in the death of three black men in Mississippi.

Before it was embraced by men, the union suit, or 'emancipation suit,' was worn by women pushing for dress reform.

Are cemeteries the right place to put Confederate statues and memorials being removed from court houses and town squares across the South?

You must always caulk the wagon. Never ford the river.

How a minister's accidental bestseller launched the country's first outdoor craze.

Not long ago, life-saving medical know-how was viewed as belonging to everyone. What happened?

Social networks existed long before the invention of social media.

A century after the Tulsa Race Massacre, what happened there is finally more widely known—but other "Black Wall Street" stories remain hidden.

Once a means of survival, and then an exploitative spectacle, the sport can also embody a synergy with a top predator in Florida’s changing landscape.

Two pioneering Black writers have not received the recognition they deserve for chronicling one of the country’s gravest crimes.

Campus police forces developed as part of an effort to wall off universities from Black neighborhoods.

A Pulitzer Prize winner punches down.

In her new book, Colley shows how written constitutions developed both as a way to further justify rulers and to turn rebellions into legitimate governments.

Omar ibn Said was captured in Senegal at 37 and enslaved in Charleston. A devout Muslim, he later converted to the Christian faith of his enslavers. Or did he?

Most Black Tulsans in 1921 were working class. But these days, it seems like the fate of those few blocks in and around “Black Wall Street” is all that matters.

How the late 19th century’s raucous party system gave way to a sedate and exclusionary political culture that erected more and more barriers to participation.

Why did the American Revolution succeed while other revolutions in the same time period did not?

Black educators have always known that their students are living in an anti-Black world and that their teaching must be set against the order of that world.

The field of political consulting was unknown before Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker founded Campaigns, Inc., in 1933.

Johnny Cash's life in a collectivist colony during the Great Depression.

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.

The property values of the popular game reflect a legacy of racism and inequality.

The alcohol epidemic devastated Native American communities, leading to crippling poverty, high mortality rates — and a successful sobriety movement.

A new exhibition celebrates the work of three Austrian artists who escaped their country as Nazis took over and created daring work in the years after.