Excerpts

The pervasive mythmaking about the supposed wisdom of the founders has covered up a central truth: the US Constitution is an antidemocratic mess.

That’s why the privileged White novelist’s work is still worth reading, Michael Gorra argues.

In 1968, history found us at a small women’s college, forging our Black identity and empowering our defiance.

Explaining the global impact of British-Chinese relations during the colonial period.

America's first mall was designed as an insular utopia, providing shelter and a controlled environment during uncertain times.

Superman et al were invented amid feverish eugenic speculation: what does the superhero craze say about our own times?

“A Promised Land” tells of a country that needed a savior.

In Massachusetts, the inclusion of Native American names and places in local geography has obscured the violence of political and territorial dispossession.

The authors of the Constitution feared mass participation would unsettle government, but it’s the privileged minority that has proved destabilizing.

Almost a century ago, a network of signals guided airmail pilots across the country. A photographer documents the remnants of this transcontinental system.

St. Louis seems to define America’s past—but does it offer insight for the future?

The Trump administration tried and failed to accomplish a count of unauthorized immigrants to reshape Congress, the Electoral College and public policy.

Reckoning with the legacy of Japanese internment in the South.

Mainstream culture denied Black children their humanity—so W. E. B. Du Bois created The Brownies’ Book to assert it.

During a slow day at work, a young marble cutter named Willis O’Brien began sculpting tiny T-Rex figurines.

Malcolm X died fifty-one years ago today, just as he was moving toward revolutionary ideas that challenged oppression in all its forms.

Their secondhand experience of past horrors can debilitate them.

Water—who owns it, who uses it—has shaped this landscape from the Paiutes’ irrigation canals to the Los Angeles aqueduct.

A gown worn by the first First Lady reveals a dimension of her nature that few have been aware of.

In "Algiers, Third World Capital," Elaine Mokhtefi captures a world of camaraderie, shared ideals, and frequent miscommunication.

Gerd Stern, the Beats, and the psychiatric institution.

In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a giant glass biosphere to practice space living. By the time they emerged, they had “suffocated, starved and went mad.”

The story of America can be told through the story of its periodicals.

At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his conversion.

Notes toward a history of isolation.

In so many ways, Limbaugh helped sow the seeds of the pathologies we're now living through.

A nameless Cold Warrior grew frustrated in his Defense Department job, and poured out his feelings in an unusual way.

Mass inequality in the Gilded Age thrived on identity-based partisanship, helping extinguish the fires of class rage. In 2021, we’re headed down the same path.

As COVID-19 races through New York, we asked Lorna Ebner to tell us about previous attempts to mitigate disease in the city.

We examine the 1918 flu to understand whether social distancing has economic costs or if slowing the spread of the pandemic reduced economic severity.

Rare footage from the 1920s, when Oklahoma was home to some 50 African-American towns.

Will the industry remain a bastion of conservatism, or take advantage of the opportunity to broaden its base?

Why Thomas Morton seems to have taken particular delight in driving the Pilgrims and Puritans out of their minds.

Arturo Schomburg's work is still inspiring researchers and cooks today.

With "A Theory Of Justice," Rawls became the most influential political philosopher of his time — just as the liberal agenda he supported was retreating.

The gourmet’s real genius wasn’t in his recipes but in his packaging. He knew how to serve up the authenticity that his audiences craved.

How talk radio established the power of the modern Republican Party.

The story of how a group of poor whites in Chicago united with the Black Panthers to fight racism and capitalism.

Thinking about our future, we look back on the aftermath of a century-old pandemic.

James Taylor, Roberta Flack, Tori Amos, Joan Armatrading, Rufus Wainwright and more on the 70s masterpiece.

We often think of the temperance movement as driven by white evangelicals set out to discipline Black Americans and immigrants. That history is wrong.

His defiance changed baseball and helped assert Black people’s worth in American culture.

COVID-19 isn’t an automatic death sentence, but the fear, vilification and isolation are the same.

The impeachment exposed the need for Republican leaders to banish the extremists and bigots from their movement.

Biden needs to stare down White supremacy, which requires strenuous enforcement of the laws.

Our past on the internet is disappearing before we can make it history.

Reagan's commitment to deregulation, aggressive military spending, and diminished oversight created a cocktail of corruption that was worse than Watergate.

Her name was Julia Chinn.

Sure, it came on the heels of World War I, but it was way more deadly.

The transatlantic convergence of two revolutionaries.