Excerpts

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.

A section of D.C.’s Congressional Cemetery has become a gathering place for honoring LGBT activists.

A conversation with Richard Jean So about combining data and literary analysis to understand how the publishing industry came to be dominated by white writers. 

In May 1921, President Harding paid tribute to a ship carrying 5,000 fallen Americans returned for burial.

How we sit isn’t the only thing midcentury modernism sought to control.

What do we know about the history of these designs? Who was buying this furniture when modernism was new, and why?

Building large memorials to display power and dominance, the US government hoped to inspire Judeo-Christian and capitalist ideals with their cemeteries.

How anti-homosexual policies throughout military history helped shape gay culture today.

Sasha Geffen’s debut book reveals that the history of pop music is a history of gender rebellion.

Ever look at the tome on a coffee table and wonder why coffee table books are a thing? Consider this brief history of coffee table books.

For decades, policymakers have debated who may access public education and the social safety net.

Is Phil Collins's legendary collection everything it's cracked up to be?

A comprehensive digital archive, map, and timeline of riots and lynchings across the U.S. in 1919.

Several recent books offer a more complete, bottom-up picture of the role sailors and Black political actors played in making the Atlantic world.

What are Latin American ideas about race, and how have they been formed in relation to the U.S. and vice versa?

Fossil Cycad National Monument held America's richest deposit of petrified cycadeoid plants, until it didn't.

Stokely Carmichael and the speech that changed the course of the civil rights movement.

How the master of suspense got his sadistic streak.

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother… for big powerful America.”

Christian, criminal or cowardly? People once thought your hair could hold the answer.

Travelers brought the Chinese game to American shores in the early 1920s. Why was it such a hit?

Government-run childcare was crucial in enabling women’s employment during World War II, but today the program has largely been forgotten.

The official newspaper of the Nation of Islam—published from 1960-1975—combined investigative journalism and Black Nationalist views on racial uplift.

Corporate motivation isn’t enough when it comes to digital preservation. Here’s a case for creating a National Register of Historic Places for websites.

What happens when “lost” films and television shows become found once again—and what that does to the work’s cultural legacy.

Dorsey and Thomas amassed important collections at a time when the future of chattel slavery and Black life hung in the balance of a national quarrel.

How banks ripped off Americans, destroyed Black wealth, and got away with it.

A nation that identifies itself with nature begins to fall apart when it can no longer agree on what nature is.

In the late 19th Century, tourism to Europe boomed because wealthy Americans could travel more quickly and safely than ever before on railroads and steamships.

We get the culture our technology permits, and in the 21st century no technological development has changed culture like that of the smartphone.

A brief history of trick photography.

A Tulsa Tribune newspaper story of an alleged assault attempt helped instigate the Tulsa Race Massacre, leaving hundreds dead along Black Wall Street.

Recorded accidentally by the Navy during the Cold War, "Songs of the Humpback Whale" became a hit album that changed perceptions about the natural world.

After gunning down his wife's lover in broad daylight, Daniel Sickles tried to escape the gallows by claiming he was out of his mind.

Why the rich historical names given to birds should not be scrubbed for the sake of political correctness.

A popular theory links the closing of state psychiatric hospitals to the increased incarceration of people with mental illness. The reality is more complicated.

On the social and political function of political media.

Booker T. Whatley introduced the concept in the 1960s for struggling Black farmers, but his agricultural contributions have been excluded from the narrative.

A new book persuasively places Malcolm X and Martin Luther King at the center of each other’s most dramatic transformations.

Today’s progressives are children of the old Republican Party, not the New Deal Democrats. Roosevelt and his followers stood for nearly everything they oppose.

The Museum of Modern Art was among several institutions that aided the CIA in its propaganda efforts, according to the new book ArtCurious.

In 1980, the whole city seemed to be on skates. I’m not sure why.

Los Angeles is finding success at reshaping its commemorative landscape.

Academic freedom can help universities flourish, while political compromises can hold them back.

It all started with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

In the history of St. Louis, we find both a radical and reactionary past—and a more hopeful future too.

Why do so many politicians think people only work if threatened or forced into doing so?

Inflation isn't inexorably a bad thing. In fact, it used to be considered good.

Malcolm Gladwell’s apologia for American butchery.