Excerpts

The police are an insulated political institution within cities empowered to enforce a racialized social order.

America’s first opioid crisis came after its bloodiest war, but the lessons of the original debacle have been lost in history.

On the legal foundations that spurred centuries of civil rights movements.

The debate among American Christians over globalism and nationalism is nothing new — rather, it has been going on for decades.

For years, the West has relied on so-called 'chop suey' fonts to communicate "Asianness" in food packaging, posters and ad campaigns.

How the myth of the overburdened white taxpayer was made.

An experiment in oral history of the present.

The wildly popular books helped people understand farming and health through the movement of the planets, in a way compatible with Protestantism.

Meet Boston Corbett, the self-castrated hatmaker who was John Wilkes Booth's Jack Ruby.

On Kyle Riismandel’s “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001.”

Debunking the myths of the domestic slave trade.

Originally, the term referred to a specific kind of foreign political violence.

A digital companion to "We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us," telling the story of Native American resistance to forced resettlement on reservations.

Heavy industry once drove Pittsburgh’s economy. Now health care does—but without the same hard-won benefits.

Over 30 years, dramatic consolidation has meant higher prices, fewer treatment options and less incentive to innovate.

What has been gained and lost from overlooking histories about the wild heterogeneity of networks that existed for well over a century?

Robert Mundell’s theories spawned decades of economic debate and still matter to the big ideas of today.

Reflections on the various legends surrounding the world's most famous ship.

Why we pay.

April 15 may be Tax Day, but for some, it’s the 14th of April that’s notorious.

Abolition in Africa brought longed-for freedoms, but also political turmoil, economic collapse and rising enslavement.

It’s easier to blame individuals for the opioid crisis than to attempt to diagnose and cure the ills of a society.

A border policy divorced from history can’t do what policymakers want.

U.S. nuclear weapons testing displaced residents of the Marshall Islands. They're still fighting for justice for the devastation of their homeland and health.

How English and Esperanto offer competing visions of a universal language.

Dezmond Floyd, age 10, has an open discussion with his mother Tanai about what happens during his school’s active shooter drills.

The challenge of documenting a virtual world.

The pandemic, like other open wounds, must be remembered with an “open” memorial.

Long in retreat in the US, the welfare state found a haven in an unlikely place – the military, where it thrived for decades.

It is time to reckon with America’s racist legacy of Interstate Highway planning and engineering.

In a career of many flops, he laid claim to the outsized success of Marvel Comics.

What is a small, historically-minded community meant to do with something like Western State Hospital?

The blind erasure of native culture is nothing new.

The transformation of tobacco and cannabis into early modern global obsessions.

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez discusses her new book on Isabel Cooper, a Filipina American actress and Douglas MacArthur’s lover.

In 1970, a hand-bound portfolio of nearly 300 drawings is found in a dumpster. It would take 41 years to identify the artist who drew them.

In the experimental world of modernist poetry, literary journals were vulnerable to fake submissions.

New York’s 300-year-old trash becomes treasure in the hands of an urban archaeologist.

Racism documented in files from the “Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane.”

Former followers of an evangelical “purity” movement that promoted a strict view of abstinence are grappling with aftershocks.

The discovery may explain the escape of Captain Henry Every after his murderous raid on an Indian emperor’s ship.

Most Americans are eager to forget 2020. But some are making time capsules to make sure future generations remember it.

Scapegoating immigrant groups in times of disease outbreak has a long history.

A Soviet blockade around Berlin cut the city off from the West. But in 1948 U.S. and British pilots began to fly food, fuel and medicine to the Allied sectors.

The 1800 election shows there is nothing new about conspiracy theories, and that they really take hold when we don’t trust each other.

A brief history of the Twenty-sixth Amendment.

The history of resistance to racial oppression includes armed, violent resistance.

Why unionism is so integral to achieving equality.

This plight dates back to the era of slavery.

Universities helped buttress a racist caste system well into the 20th century.