Excerpts

In 1964, Harper Lee talked with WQXR host Roy Newquist for an interview in New York.

Jane Addams and the interwar women’s peace movement: feminist contributions to international relations.

Throughout its history, the vast Arctic island has been viewed by competing powers as a strategic prize and geopolitical asset.

Anita Bryant’s legacy is not what she hoped—but her destructive message lives on.

How a lively market on Boston Harbor became part of many defining moments of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras.

In the 1920s, many in the U.S. fought for a living Constitution. Plenty of others wanted it dead.

The U.S. faces the likelihood of a bruising and raucous set of confirmation hearings — a clear break from the cooperative system the founders established.

The origins of the Electoral College are entwined with slavery, but not in the way that recent accounts have suggested.

The abusive experiments on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School were only one part of a much larger unethical research program.

Were the Knights of the Golden Circle responsible for Lincoln’s assassination? No one knows, but far-right secret societies always draw power from speculation.

In which John B. Calhoun begins to study the lifestyles of rodents, and the public listens.

On the lengths newspaper publishers took to reach new subscribers — and then drive them away — in the 1930s.

Ford Motor Company claims its Cologne plant was confiscated by Nazis, but newly discovered documents and correspondence prove otherwise.

In the 1970s, some athletes began questioning the alliance between sports, conservative Christianity, and politics.

Five years from the emergence of the disease, the world — and the climate — is still grappling with its effects.

Rap beef is form of capitalist accumulation that enriches artists—and, most of all, the corporate suits that run their record labels.

An interactive map of public commemoration of the Civil War and the civil rights movement in the South.

A new theory of the leisure class influencer.

The Constitution is absolutely clear on this point, but will that matter?

In the United States, the Populist tradition has always defined left-wing and egalitarian politics, unfairly maligned by bosses and intellectuals alike.

The past, present, and future of your family tree are all far more fascinating than you realize.

When R.E. Buster Williams ruled jukeboxes and jukeboxes ruled music.

On the evening of October 7, 1952, gospel promoters booked the Spirit of Memphis for a concert in Memphis’s Mason Temple.

Which public figures impacted baby naming trends?

Why Netflix looks like that.

The Pyramid Club is the stuff of downtown New York legend. In the 1980s, a tiny little dive bar became ground zero for the exploding New York drag scene.

While America was fighting on the ground, the Federation was fighting in space.

Are we doomed to repetition? It’s something I worry about.

Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.

For the people of Old Bhopal, an accident there had sent forty metric tons of methyl isocyanate into a runaway reaction that released a toxic gas.

The rise and fall of an evangelical church, founded with progressive intentions and undone by dissension and bad faith.

Karen Silkwood death and smear campaign highlights how retaliation against whistleblowers deflects scrutiny from power by targeting the messenger.

Even Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship has a historical link to the Chinese American experience.

For all of his personal Christian devotion, he could not capture the hearts of white evangelicals.

History also changes because of strange, flawed, deeply human people doing unremarkable, tedious, and often boring work.

In Black Southern life, guns have been a sign of readiness against constant threats.

Dismantling it requires getting the story right.

Ray Schoenke started campaigning for George McGovern in 1971 because he wanted to make a difference. The experience ended up changing his life.

The bishops once used their influence to encourage nuclear disarmament. Can they do so again now?

Pryor's use of the word represented something valiant.

Bob Dylan decided he wanted to subvert the expectations of his fans – and rebel against industry forces intent on pigeonholing him and his work.

Our new age of violence looks a lot like the Gilded Age.

What it conveys is quite specific: grandeur, beauty, dynamism, and power.

Today’s Trumpist radicals are not (small-c) conservatives – but they stand in the continuity of Modern Conservatism’s defining political project.

What kind of Christmas did we used to know? To hear some critics and historians tell it, the holiday used to be a lot more religious than it is now.

This remarkably prescient document holds several lessons about how to run foreign policy.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s declaration of martial law is of little import compared to the American occupation of the country.

Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein has cultivated a reputation as a well-meaning advocate of history education. What does that image mask?

The 1946 elections were a disaster for Democrats—and the reason I was born.

Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett each had a different vision of reproductive freedom. Would reproductive rights be more secure if Dennett’s had prevailed?