Excerpts

How a friendship between a straight psychology professor and her gay student busted the myth of homosexuality as an illness.

An insightful exploration of the ways America has read ‘the Great American Novel.’

The United Stated Emigrant Escort Service and settler colonialism during the Civil War.

How the American Anti-Slavery Almanac became an influential best seller.

Native communities in North America have been particularly hard-hit by COVID-19. This isn't the first time.

Having a species named after you is an honor. Not everyone deserves it.

In the 1780s, medical schools used cadavers stolen from the cemeteries of slaves.

Photographer Peter Campbell captured many scenes from the 1939 New York World's Fair in full color, both during the day and at night.

For decades, flying saucers were a punch line. Then the U.S. government got over the taboo.

In a book and documentary series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers a wide-ranging tour of Black religion in America.

There are whole hidden worlds pressing into this one.

As the U.S. anticipates a vaccinated summer, historians say measuring the impact of the 1918 influenza on the uproarious decade that followed is tricky.

Mieke Kierkels and Chris Dickon have been collaborating on several projects to remember the sacrifices of African American soldiers during World War II.

Each generation revises his myth. Here’s the true story.

The recent passing of Pal Benko and Shelby Lyman draws the curtain on an American period that produced some of the game’s most sparkling play.

Let's talk about the period when Roosevelt actually created the modern welfare state.

When an event promises you will "hear the body broadcast its sounds," "see without light," and "see dancers float on air,” there’s bound to be disappointment.

Activists on the campaign were dedicated, but the city of Chicago and the FBI had conspired to murder the city’s best organizer that night in December 1969.

This 20th century ornithologist earned the respect of her contemporaries for her animal behavior research that went against the grain of traditional science.

How Better Homes in America—a collaboration between Herbert Hoover and the editor of a conservative women’s magazine—promoted idealized whiteness.

The history of Blackness on this continent is longer and more varied than the version I was taught in school.

Yvonne Seale on a bizarre and fanciful piece of genealogical scholarship and what it tells us about identity in late 19th-century America.

Popular politics and reconstructing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Set the Night on Fire isn't just a portrait of a city in upheaval. It's a history of uprisings for civil rights, against poverty, and for a better world.

For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

In a devastating 1793 epidemic people transformed their newspaper into something like today’s social media.

In a newly discovered letter, the famed abolitionist wrote that ‘no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth'

The surge in violence against Asian-Americans is a reminder that America’s present reality reflects its exclusionary past.

The 1918 flu pandemic helped to usher in the Hollywood studio system. Could Covid-19 transform the industry?

Joe Biden was a lot more careful around the press after this 1974 profile.

Biden’s assistance to William Casey, Reagan’s CIA director, and the rehabilitation of the intelligence service in general has had tragic consequences.

In Guatemala, the CIA hired an American actor and two radio DJs to oust a president.

In 1872, Charles Sumner decries “a president who makes his great office a plaything and perquisite.”

The Popular Front and American culture.

It’s not just “Cinco De Drinko,” and it isn’t Mexican Independence Day.

Pete Seeger, William F. Buckley, Jr., and public history.

The first in a series of posts to offer evidence casting doubt on the view that New Deal programs ended the Great Depression.

Despite Freedom of Information requests throughout the years, New York still will not release records to the public.

The Puritans had little tolerance for those who didn't conform to their vision of the world.

Entangled with, yet critical of, colonial oppression and the evils of slavery, the true history of Boston can now be told.

A photo archive shows college coeds vacuuming, preparing baby bottles, diapering babies, and generally practicing at motherhood.

The Texan secessionists are at it again.

The measure of thermal energy expended by exercise was adapted from the study of explosives and engines.

How midlife crises—and menopause—came to be defined by the experience of men.

Gangs and mafiosos have a long history with food crime.