Excerpts

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.

“Pseudoscience,” race, and American politics.

SWAT teams were created in the 1960s to combat violent events. Since then, the specialized teams have morphed into something very different.

Scientists explain how viruses, like Covid-19, spill over from animals to people, and what we must do to stop the next pandemic.

Some issues are too fundamental for a party to withstand, and the consequences can last for a generation.

How do some companies regain public trust after something goes seriously wrong, while others fail?

With many men 'missing' from the population in the aftermath of the 1918 flu, women stepped into public roles that hadn't previously been open to them.

Conservators are restoring a series of dioramas created for the 1940 American Negro Exposition, bringing their magical artistry, and stories, back to life.

In the 1950s, Harlem mother Mae Mallory fought a school system that she saw as 'just as Jim Crow' as the one she had attended in the South.

Three new books examine how the rise of coal, oil, and gas have permanently remade our world.

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

A new book shares a cautionary tale of the American surveillance state.

In 1971, armed officers went to a house occupied by Black Panther activists, marking a policing trajectory toward a more militarized response to Black activism.

The new crime thriller about a magnetic leader of the Black Panther Party is a sharp criticism of the FBI’s surveillance of social movements past and present.

Even so, many diseases have been tamed. Will Covid-19 be next?

Why I’ve made it my mission to teach others about Prince Hall.

As Presidents' Day approaches, historians look back at the most notable recent uses and misuses of "the Great Emancipator's" words.

When Alfred Winslow Jones created the hedge fund in 1949, the key to its approach was short sales, a practice the GameStop mess returned to public infamy.

Abraham Lincoln fought clinical depression all his life. But what would today be treated as a "character issue" gave Lincoln the tools to save the nation.

A comparative look at the U.S. and Peru's emancipation proclamations' nuances in declaring the freedom of enslaved peoples.

Cuddle up with your sweetie for stories about three centuries of pre-marital intimacy, from Puritan "bundling" to the back-seat of the parents' Buick.