Excerpts

The 50-year effort to advance a conservative legal agenda.

Generations of readers have chosen to emphasize Thoreau's spiritual communion with Nature, but Walden begins with trenchant critique of “progress.”

The link between medical abuse, racism and immigration runs deep.

Hearing about backlash to what kids are learning in U.S. History classrooms? It could have been last week—or 150 years ago.

Every statue defends an idea about history, but what if those ideas are wrong?

Juxtaposing contemporary public health data with 1930s redlining maps reveals one of the legacies of urban racial segregation.

Using one’s buying power to support causes one believes in and to effect change is not new.

Richard J. Werther discusses how being outmanned by the best army in the world led American revolutionaries to look overseas for the help they needed.

"How long can it go on?"

Many prisons, especially in the South, are named after racist officials and former plantations.

On William Gibson, Sonic Youth, and the genesis of the American suburb.

“Megafires” are now a staple of life in the Pacific Northwest, but how we talk about them illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself.

After two decades in a filing cabinet and three next to a parking lot in Baltimore, the author returns to New York.

Langston Hughes, "poet laureate of Harlem," dreamed of an America that lived up to its ideals.

When a converted ice cream wagon blew up in Wall Street, it was the loudest burst in a war between the Federal government and American Anarchists.

Newly added to Netflix, the Civil War movie reminds the nation that black Americans fought for their own emancipation.

The story of William Higginbotham & the Black community in Civil War Rome.

As was the case in 200 years ago, this summer's relentless pyrotechnics may not be meaningless acts of an unthinking mob.

Calling QAnon a "cult" or "religion" hides how its practices are born of deeply American social and political traditions.

Expanding campus police forces’ power threatens to increase surveillance.

Since its invention in 1743, roller skating has been tied to Black social movements.

Because the 19th-century college president appeared white, he was able to climb the ladder of the Jesuit community.

Moral complexity may be an argument against unthinking iconoclasm. It is not, however, an argument for never taking down statues.

From plague times to the coronavirus, the history of our flawed ability to process mass casualty events.

Racism in medicine, including through forced vaccinations, has created skepticism toward public health campaigns.

Chile voted calmly to have a Marxist-Leninist state, the first nation in the world to make this choice freely and knowingly, on September 4, 1970.

Racism — not reformers demanding redress — is the source of American strife.

The polarized dialogue over Vietnam and the civil rights movement convinced Ginsberg that America was teetering on the precipice of a fall.

A patriotic parade, a bloody brawl, and the origins of U.S. law enforcement’s war on the political left.

Jill Filipovic on the generation that changed everything.

Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism.

What I relearned (about well-meaning liberalism, race, my late father, and my young gay self) rewatching the TV cop shows of my 1970s youth.

The Mourning Woman emerged during a revival of classical symbolism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gravestone iconography.

30 years ago, it was a huge fire in Yellowstone National Park that stoked media attention and political controversy.

America's sense of religious nationalism was forged in the same fires that ignited the profoundly secular French Revolution.

How the attempt to claim Beethoven as Black actually recycles racist tropes.

Not since Reconstruction has there been such an opportunity for the advancement of racial justice.

"No one story can completely explain Annie."

A look at how the word, a surprisingly recent addition to the English lexicon, made its way into the dictionary.

Remembering the woman who outsang Ray Charles.

Since its emergence in the middle of the twentieth century, the American Empire has been fueled by the search for an enemy.

A reduction in public housing units left Americans at the mercy of private landlords.

One idea inherited from 1960s radicalism is that of “white privilege,” a protean concept invoked to explain wealth, political power, and even cognition.

The border blurred the stark dividing line between white and black in America, something that Americans like William Ellis used to their advantage.

It’s not obsolete, and it’s not a business.

How a legacy of violent nationalism haunts the republic in the age of Trump.

Images from a century ago of people doing their best to keep others and themselves safe.

An empire built on the backs and blood of enslaved Africans.

The role of Black churches in the Reconstruction of the United States.

A post-9/11 veteran novelist explores a post-Vietnam literary soiree gone bad, and finds timeless lessons about a contentious and still-evolving genre.