Excerpts

Not long ago, life-saving medical know-how was viewed as belonging to everyone. What happened?

Social networks existed long before the invention of social media.

A century after the Tulsa Race Massacre, what happened there is finally more widely known—but other "Black Wall Street" stories remain hidden.

Once a means of survival, and then an exploitative spectacle, the sport can also embody a synergy with a top predator in Florida’s changing landscape.

Two pioneering Black writers have not received the recognition they deserve for chronicling one of the country’s gravest crimes.

Campus police forces developed as part of an effort to wall off universities from Black neighborhoods.

A Pulitzer Prize winner punches down.

In her new book, Colley shows how written constitutions developed both as a way to further justify rulers and to turn rebellions into legitimate governments.

Omar ibn Said was captured in Senegal at 37 and enslaved in Charleston. A devout Muslim, he later converted to the Christian faith of his enslavers. Or did he?

Most Black Tulsans in 1921 were working class. But these days, it seems like the fate of those few blocks in and around “Black Wall Street” is all that matters.

How the late 19th century’s raucous party system gave way to a sedate and exclusionary political culture that erected more and more barriers to participation.

Why did the American Revolution succeed while other revolutions in the same time period did not?

Black educators have always known that their students are living in an anti-Black world and that their teaching must be set against the order of that world.

The field of political consulting was unknown before Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker founded Campaigns, Inc., in 1933.

Johnny Cash's life in a collectivist colony during the Great Depression.

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.

The property values of the popular game reflect a legacy of racism and inequality.

The alcohol epidemic devastated Native American communities, leading to crippling poverty, high mortality rates — and a successful sobriety movement.

A new exhibition celebrates the work of three Austrian artists who escaped their country as Nazis took over and created daring work in the years after.

A section of D.C.’s Congressional Cemetery has become a gathering place for honoring LGBT activists.

A conversation with Richard Jean So about combining data and literary analysis to understand how the publishing industry came to be dominated by white writers. 

In May 1921, President Harding paid tribute to a ship carrying 5,000 fallen Americans returned for burial.

How we sit isn’t the only thing midcentury modernism sought to control.

What do we know about the history of these designs? Who was buying this furniture when modernism was new, and why?

Building large memorials to display power and dominance, the US government hoped to inspire Judeo-Christian and capitalist ideals with their cemeteries.

How anti-homosexual policies throughout military history helped shape gay culture today.

Sasha Geffen’s debut book reveals that the history of pop music is a history of gender rebellion.

Ever look at the tome on a coffee table and wonder why coffee table books are a thing? Consider this brief history of coffee table books.

For decades, policymakers have debated who may access public education and the social safety net.

Is Phil Collins's legendary collection everything it's cracked up to be?

A comprehensive digital archive, map, and timeline of riots and lynchings across the U.S. in 1919.

Several recent books offer a more complete, bottom-up picture of the role sailors and Black political actors played in making the Atlantic world.

What are Latin American ideas about race, and how have they been formed in relation to the U.S. and vice versa?

Fossil Cycad National Monument held America's richest deposit of petrified cycadeoid plants, until it didn't.

Stokely Carmichael and the speech that changed the course of the civil rights movement.

How the master of suspense got his sadistic streak.

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother… for big powerful America.”

Christian, criminal or cowardly? People once thought your hair could hold the answer.

Travelers brought the Chinese game to American shores in the early 1920s. Why was it such a hit?

Government-run childcare was crucial in enabling women’s employment during World War II, but today the program has largely been forgotten.

The official newspaper of the Nation of Islam—published from 1960-1975—combined investigative journalism and Black Nationalist views on racial uplift.

Corporate motivation isn’t enough when it comes to digital preservation. Here’s a case for creating a National Register of Historic Places for websites.

What happens when “lost” films and television shows become found once again—and what that does to the work’s cultural legacy.

Dorsey and Thomas amassed important collections at a time when the future of chattel slavery and Black life hung in the balance of a national quarrel.

How banks ripped off Americans, destroyed Black wealth, and got away with it.

A nation that identifies itself with nature begins to fall apart when it can no longer agree on what nature is.

In the late 19th Century, tourism to Europe boomed because wealthy Americans could travel more quickly and safely than ever before on railroads and steamships.

We get the culture our technology permits, and in the 21st century no technological development has changed culture like that of the smartphone.

A brief history of trick photography.