Excerpts

A bizarre episode in circus history became an unlikely forum for discussing 19th-century theories of race.

American fiction of the 19th century often featured a cruel doctor, whose unfeeling fascination with bodily suffering readers found unnerving.

Jeanna Kadlec considers Anne Lister, the center figure of HBO’s Gentleman Jack, and the influence of other preceding queer women.

The Doomsday Clock is set to two minutes to midnight. So why don't we make movies about nuclear war anymore?

A Lippincott Library collection shows how, during World War II, companies highlighted their war contributions via annual reports.

Submarines played a major role in WW I. But the first submersible was actually used, unsuccessfully, in the Revolutionary War.

Rikers Island jails were supposed to be the more humane model when they were built. New York City has the same lofty goals as it plans Rikers’ replacements.

American System-Built Homes in Chicago (and elsewhere).

As the 2020 presidential election nears, internationalists are plotting their return. But they still haven’t learned from the failure of liberal universalism.

Atlantic writer William Phillips conducted three interviews with Brown before Brown's fateful raid on Harper's Ferry.

Everything you knew about mass incarceration is wrong.

In the period immediately following World War II, the femme fatale embodied a host of male anxieties about gender roles.

In segregated units set up under the Federal Theatre Project, African American artists took on work usually reserved for whites and wrote radical dramas.

Schools closed, handshaking ceased and people wore handkerchiefs over their faces as the virus ravaged what was then the nation’s capital.

What is the role of artists in a crisis?

During the Great Depression, the daughter of the first Jewish Supreme Court justice and the son of a prominent Christian theologian changed America.

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?