Excerpts

Oy Bay! Become seasoned on the history of America's beloved spice blend.

How John and Jessie Frémont explored the frontiers of legend-making.

A look into Basque tree carvings in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Acclimatization societies believed that animals could fill the gaps of a deficient environment.

The predigital dream of the audiobook.

Disease reshapes our lives in surprising ways.

Group biographies and the female friendship vogue.

Recent works inspired by his fiction struggle to reckon with his racist fantasies.

The famous activist reflects on what radicals like him got right and got wrong, and what today’s socialists should learn from his experiences.

Comedian Richard Pryor's performance of Blackness throughout his career.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

The bowl-shaped seat's conflicted heritage incorporates the Vietnam War.

Privately published memoir of an American portraitist who grew up in a log cabin and went on to paint presidents and Daniel Boone.

How city leaders and real estate barons used sunshine and oranges to market Los Angeles.

Who was behind the "Trumpist manifesto" released twenty years before Trump became president?

A curiously inflexible brand of race-first neoliberalism has taken root in American political discourse.

The KKK was clearly present at Harvard. But the university rarely mentions the 20th century in its attempts to reckon with its past.

A welfare state doesn't distort the market; it just makes government aid fairer.

Dark was the night, cold was the ground, and brilliant is that song drifting through space.

These letters and journals offer insights on how to record one's thoughts amid a pandemic.

Much of the world used to treat drug addiction as a health issue, not a criminal one. And then America got its way.

The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments tried to remove the power of the states to impede key rights.

She was one half of a powerhouse academic couple and an influential historian in her own right. But she's still often overlooked.

How do we memorialize life online when it’s constantly disappearing?

Trump, Biden, and public lands.

Daryl Michael Scott on propaganda and myth from ‘The 1619 Project’ to Trumpism.

While focusing on refuting the Lost Cause narrative, many historians forget to memorialize Black Americans in the post Civil War period.

Reconciliation is good — but not at any cost.

Self-help guru Louise Hay’s “Hayrides” drew in thousands during the hopelessness and government neglect of the AIDS crisis.

A recent documentary reminds us of her family’s strength and our own weakness.

Whose body was harvested to create a spectacular anatomical specimen, and did that person know they would be on display more than a century later?

Swedberg's new book shows how prevalent concerns about mental illness were to the people of the early American republic.

Both parties play the redistricting game, redrawing electoral boundaries to lock down power.

The amendment didn't “give” women the right to vote. It wasn’t a gift; it was a hard-won victory achieved after more than seventy years of suffragist agitation.

On March 3, 1913, thousands of women gathered in Washington D.C. for the Women's Suffrage Parade -- the first mass protest for a woman's right to vote.

While they advanced African American rights, they had serious flaws, Eric Foner writes.

Racial covenants and housing discrimination in 20th century Minneapolis.

Some cities are trying to help poor children succeed by having their families move to middle-income, "opportunity areas" -- an idea once politically impossible.

Has the government done enough to stop housing discrimination?

The restrictions imposed during recent racial justice protests have their roots in efforts to “contain” Black Americans. 

A new exhibit at the Detroit Public Library, displays old images of the historic African American neighborhood in its final days.

Images of decaying daguerreotypes whose photographic fixing was subject to decay like the people they captured.

For Freud, “chosenness” was a psychopathological fantasy in need of explanation.

Six decades ago, Gordon Parks, Life magazine’s first black photographer, revolutionized what a crime photo could look like.

Democrats’ policies aim to address societal problems to make fascism and socialism less attractive.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman authored the beloved short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," but also supported eugenics and nativism.

The individualization of risk that we often think of as part of neoliberalism already existed strongly in the early 20th century.

The city will memorialize part of its darkest history at the refurnished Walnut Street Bridge.

One Texas Republican state House member wants to create a “patriotic” education project to celebrate the Lone Star State—and whitewash its ugly past.

New Jersey was known as the slave state of the North, and our early economy was built on unpaid labor.