Excerpts

For close to a century, conservatives have seen all government programs as the road to socialism.

Historians' prohibition on 'presentism' crumbles under the weight of events.

Why secession, separatism, and disunion are the most American of values.

Using history to guide us in the difficult present.

How two competing definitions of the idea evolved over 250 years—and why they remain largely irreconcilable.

The story of James Rivington, the publisher who got on the wrong side of the Sons of Liberty.

Behind the friendship was a more complicated relationship, which now drives the former vice president to prove his partner wrong.

It wasn’t a culminating moment, but the start of a new fight to secure voting rights for all Americans.

Reform was framed as a way of removing “politics” from postal affairs and giving more autonomy to postal management. In time, it would prove to do neither.

The 1850 novel reveals disturbing continuities between the 19th century cholera pandemics and global health crises today.

How the myth of a liberal North erases a long history of white violence.

Even housing policies that sought to create more Black homeowners were stymied by racism and a determination to shrink the government’s presence.

In 1920, like 2020, race became the pivot of a historic turning point.

Choosing a running mate used to be more about campaigning than governing. But after Richard Nixon’s ruinous relationship with Spiro Agnew, the job has changed.

Have historians of the conservative movement focused too much on its intellectuals?

The Great Emancipator's character and anti-slavery legacy has been questioned by Black Americans for over a century.

What the long history of the autonomous vehicle reveals about its fast-approaching future.

Clinton disparaged Carmichael at John Lewis’s funeral. But Black radicalism speaks more to the present moment than Clinton’s centrist politics.

A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.

Monsters have always patrolled the margins of the map. By their very strangeness, they determined the boundaries of the regular world.

Tomboys and the endless privileges accorded to white girls.

In 1952, the newspaper publisher and activist joined a long-shot bid by the Progressive Party, paving the way for politicians like Harris.

Will coronavirus prompt the house of cards of college athletics to come tumbling down?

Examining the life of Father Divine, the black preacher who called for the destruction of racial separation and claimed to be God.

There is, and always has been, a vanishingly thin line between charismatic democratic rulers and charismatic authoritarians.

For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices.

Why Americans rejected educating only the children of the wealthy.

A century after the passage of the 19th Amendment, women with felony convictions remain disenfranchised.

An interview with historian Charles B. Dew.

Americans should not honor a revolt to uphold slavery with monuments or florid displays.

McCarthy never sent a single “subversive” to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures.

Republicans are replacing the public good with a far narrower definition of it.

Chicago has been a skunk haven for centuries.

The South’s mythology glamorized a noble defeat. Trump backers may do the same.

The initial movement to build memorials to the Confederacy and its supposed “lost cause” were the original cancel culture.

The policy roots of today’s childcare crisis.

Truman’s radio address on August 9, 1945 frames Hiroshima as a “military base” to justify its bombing.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Remembering "Hiroshima," the story that changed everything.

How many people really died because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings? It’s complicated. There are at least two credible answers.

Why was a second bomb used against Japan, so soon after Hiroshima? A review of several theories.

Comedy from Mad Magazine to The Simpsons.

Whether it’s happening or not.

Beneath the popular folk song, “Swannanoa Tunnel” and the railroad tracks that run through Western North Carolina is a story of blood, greed, and obfuscation.

In “Radical Hamilton,” Christian Parenti argues that the left should use Alexander Hamilton’s mythologized status to drive home his full agenda.

Government investment into a cancer vaccine had drawbacks.

Most recent scholarship, while supporting the view that the policy was vicious, has not addressed the question of genocide.

In fact, Black activists and civil rights leaders have been advocating for compensation for the trauma and cost of slavery for centuries.

Fleeing the Haitian revolution, whites and free blacks were viewed with suspicion by American slaveholders, including Thomas Jefferson.

The denigration of kitsch betrays a latent anti-Catholicism, one born from centuries of class and ethnic divisions.