Excerpts

Explore maps of 142 cities to see the lingering harms of the racist lending policies known as redlining.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories can foment violence and thwart democracy.

Ed Ayers visits the site where the transcontinental railroad was completed. He considers the project's human costs, and discovers how the environment and photography played key roles on the rails.

The movement for school desegregation took some of its first steps with a student strike in rural Virginia. Ed Ayers learns about those who made it happen.

Richmond was the epicenter of black finance. What happened there explains the decline of black-owned banks across the country.

How the President could endanger the official records of one of the most consequential periods in American history.

On the Black labor organizers who fought for civil rights after Reconstruction and through the twentieth century.

Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers.

White women were as married to the war as their Confederate menfolk.

Activists concerned about pandemic-related homelessness are seeking rent relief. In the 1930s, tenants banded together against evictions.

What does the way we mourn, remember, and care for our dead say about us?

How the preeminent photographic record of the period excluded people of color from the nation’s self-image.

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

"Rethinking Rufus" argues that enslaved black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women.

Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.

Underground Railroad simulations have ignited controversy about whether they confront the country’s darkest history or trivialize its gravest traumas.

Uncovering the truth about the 1898 massacre of black voters in Wilmington, North Carolina.

A conversation about the roots of organized resistance to federal regulation of public lands in the American West.

More diverse regular history classes are the key to a historically literate population.

The modern conception of freedom emerged as an antidemocratic reaction by elites who wanted to curtail state power.

Appeals to childhood innocence helped enshrine undocumented kids’ access to education. But this has also inadvertently reinforced criminalization.

In 1880, a new generation helped decide the closest popular vote in U.S. history.

Radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

History is asking only one question right now as Trump refuses to concede. Will the Republicans decide they are no longer an American political party?

Ed Ayers visits public historians in Boston and Philadelphia and explores what “freedom” meant to those outside the halls of power in the Revolutionary era.

Ed Ayers visits the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and learns how public outcry inspired safety laws that revolutionized industrial work nationwide.

The Federal Theatre Project put dramatic artists to work — and we could do it again.

How a long-abandoned practice became a way for undocumented immigrants to seek protection.

How the founders settled on the system we love to hate today.

How the presumption of bystanders’ responsibility crystallized into the predominant opinion.

Over the first half of the 20th century, the movement galvanized groups throughout the Americas who helped inaugurate what we think of today as global feminism.

‘Struggle: From the History of the American People’ charts the strife of early US history in a fierce Cubist/Expressionist style.

The creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’ dramatized isolation and fear but still believed in the best of humanity.

Pittsburgh photographer Teenie Harris focused on the patriotism of men who fought for the country abroad while being discriminated against at home.

William Eggleston’s photographs of the South on the eve of the 1976 election captured an eerie quiet.

A new book on American punk paints the movement as the last gasp of left-wing cultural resistance in the 1980s.

'Freedom!' tried to show the horrors of antebellum slavery and the courage of escaping slaves. But neither schools nor audiences were ready for it.

"The Road to Unfreedom," Timothy Snyder's book on Russian influence around the world, is built on contradiction and conspiracy.

Comparing Trump's America to fascist Germany only fuels elites' antidemocratic fantasies.

How the U.S. government used veterans as atomic guinea pigs.

Black veterans were once targeted for racialized violence because of the equality with whites that their military service implied.

Black people emerged from the war bloodied and scarred. Still, the war marked a turning point in their struggles for freedom.

The chaotic quest to mythologize America’s past.

On the mournful threads connecting his half-century in politics.

Jaime Harrison lost to Lindsey Graham but expanded Democrats’ vision of what’s possible in the Deep South.

A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.

Today's housing crisis in San Francisco originates from zoning laws that segregated racial groups and income levels.

On the passage and enforcement of laws to exclude or deport immigrants for their beliefs, and the people who challenged those laws.

Procedures drive the bottom line in our medical system.