Excerpts

How brutal outlaws became romanticized.

Nostalgia is not merely reductive; it is also productive.

Since the release of "Future Shock" 50 years ago, the allure of speculative nonfiction has remained the same: We all want to know what’s coming next.

Pirates did roam the Gulf Coast, but more myths than facts have inspired the regional folklore.

A stroll through the archives of Editor & Publisher shows an industry with moments of glory and shame — and evidence that not all of today's problems are new.

The 1868 Election was the first one in which hundreds of thousands of African American men voted. It also began an unfortunate history of voter suppression.

A story of how Louis Wain single handedly made cats adored by Victorian society through to modern day.

A recent history centers the Lakota and the vast territory they controlled in the story of the formation of the United States.

The panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that triggered a multi-year economic depression.

Alejandro Mayorkas and the limits of liberal law-and-order immigration politics.

The cultural contradictions of Call of Duty.

Thousands of New York City students staged a one-day boycott to protest segregation – and it barely made the history books.

The literature that arose from the influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways, offering connections in the exact realms where art excels.

The era of anti-fascist struggle was a crucial moment for Black radicals of all stripes.

Jane Dailey considers the power of the law to reinforce racism.

Outbreak narratives from past diseases can be influential in the way we think about the COVID pandemic.

Policing public health is likely to result in increased racial disparities.

A new release records the musician’s early metamorphosis—unmoored, broke, living for a time in an attic—when her lodestar was her big, strange, unwieldy talent.

Any true reckoning with racism must include our schools.

The backstory to the backstory of America’s mythic promise.

Historians say that a major milestone in the history of school integration is often left out of the civil rights story.

The largest civil rights demonstration in U.S. history was not in Little Rock. Or Selma. Or Montgomery. It happened in New York City.

In three centuries, the heresies of two bankers became the basis of our modern economy.

The pandemic is stress-testing two concepts Americans have historically gotten wrong.

Far from a marginal outsider, a new biography contends, Thorstein Veblen was the most important economic thinker of the Gilded Age.

For much of the twentieth century, African Americans embraced eugenics as a means of racial improvement.

Michael Prodger on the artists who make huge sums for painting the US flag.

Perpetual outsiders, Mormons spent 200 years assimilating to a certain national ideal—only to find their country in an identity crisis.

In the late 19th century, Black bartenders gained esteem in the North and South. But their experiences were very different — in ways that may defy assumptions.

Without justice for all, none of us are free.

A state with an often-overlooked history of enslavement demonstrates the lasting significance and geographic reach of the Haitian Revolution.

The genealogy site fails to understand the fundamental differences between white and black history.

How and why a Los Angeles folk artist created a vast array of intricate dioramas to form the African American Miniature Museum.

Julia Gaffield reviews two books that discuss the transatlantic slave trade.

From Alexander Hamilton to Richard Nixon and more: meddling, fixing, rigging, fraud, and violence.

On the 250th anniversary of the famous composer’s birth, the story of how his music first took hold across the Atlantic.

Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all illnesses—including COVID-19—are social problems for humans to solve.

Fears that teachers were indoctrinating kids were rampant in the 1950s. But the reality was more complicated.

Material benefits trumped FDR's terrible civil rights records.

With chatter about Texas leaving the union on the rise, two new books remind us what it was like the last time we tried to go it alone.

Ordinances, arrests, and celebrations during the influenza epidemic.

And the "gentleman" doctors who made them.

When I spoke with my boyhood hero 25 years after his famous home run, I learned why he’d kept going through the death threats and the hate.

Debunking the myth that the great national park was a wilderness untouched by humans

The vision of feminist labor organizing that guided the women’s white-collar organizing project 9to5 should still be our north star.

Absent social media, the artists of the past shaped public knowledge of historical events through illustrations.

Fears about “undeserving” people receiving public assistance have deep ties to racism and the policing of black women’s bodies.

From Bronze Age farmers to New World colonialists, the stories of struggle to claim more ground have shaped where and how we live.

In ACT UP, belonging was not conferred by blood. Care was offered when you joined others on the street with the intent to bring the AIDS crisis to an end.

In 1964, the John Birch Society was the most active far-right group in the United States—unless you count the Republican Party.