Excerpts

Who counts determines whose interests are represented in government.

The controversy over buildings, statues, and awards honoring racists has finally reached the baseball establishment.

The 'Gone With the Wind' film legend, who died at age 104, went up against a broken Hollywood studio system—and helped change the industry forever.

How "The Bookman" invented the best seller.

Why the Gilded Age was the era of statues.

Washington supported a much more limited conception of executive privilege.

Environmental historian Donald E. Worster pushes back against recent characterizations of Muir as a racist.

The Supreme Court has betrayed the promise of equal citizenship by allowing police to arrest and kill Americans at will.

Were the celebrities in this 1941 photograph making a patriotic gesture or paying their respects to Hitler?

Kennedy defined courage as a willingness to take an unpopular stand in service of a larger, higher cause. But what cause?

Black people suffer disproportionately from police violence. But white skin does not provide immunity.

For most of American history, the light-skinned Jesus conjured up by white congregations demanded the preservation of inequality as part of the divine order.

The world's eyes are upon America as it struggles with racism and inequality. This is nothing new.

The diseases that prove best suited to global expansion are those that best exploit humans' global networks and behaviors in a given age.

The loudest opponents to police funding were once fiscal conservatives.

In 1920, James Weldon Johnson went to Washington, armed with census data, to fight rampant voter suppression across the American South.

We are at the end of an era, as choices made in the 1970s have created a society that seems unable to cope with a crisis such as that posed by the coronavirus.

Unlike the statues of Lee and Jackson, these Charlottesville monuments had less to do with memory than they did with an imagined past.

The remarkable stories of the nine other women in the Harvard Law class of ’59—as told by them, their families, and a SCOTUS justice who remembers them all.

They’re good for kickstarting political debate but analogies with the past are often ahistorical and should be treated with care.

The Sierra Club's executive director takes a hard look at the white supremacy baked into the organization's formative years.

What the capitalization of "Black" will mean for students and their teachers.

Philip Wylie’s "Generation of Vipers," revisited.

Wielding the outside agitator trope has always, at bottom, been a way of putting dissidents in their place.

One has to wonder whether the advocates of a new Cold War have taken the measure of the challenge posed by 21st-century China.

Grass-roots pressure will be key to turning the idea into reality.

From the 1918 Spanish flu to Covid-19, broken treaties have been the foundation of health crises among Native people.

For so many of the millions of tourists who come to Orlando, this—Disney, Universal Studios, I-Drive, all of it—stands in for America itself.

Policing is not the only kind of state violence. City governments have demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.

Iran and surplus imperialism.

Hunting shirts, backcountry culture, and “playing Indian” in the American Revolution.

Miles Harvey on the life and times of James J. Strang.

Paper was never simply a writing surface, but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness.

“Modern Housing,” by Catherine Bauer, argued—as many activists do today—that a decent home should be seen as a public utility and a basic right.

157 years after the famous battle, Gettysburg endured another invasion.

Futuristic control rooms with endless screens of blinking data are proliferating in cities across the globe. Welcome to the age of Dashboard Governance.

The real challenge is not simply to replace Trump, but to fix a system that produces, promotes, and protects the toxicity that defines his presidency.

Stranger danger and the specter of childhood.

Susan Neiman, a philosopher who studies Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi past, examines how the United States can remember slavery and segregation.

The fight over free education is much older than you think.

Worried that the presidential power to undo convictions can be taken too far? Look no further than Lincoln’s successor.

The shameful career of Roger Sherman, mild-mannered Yankee.

Cynthia Tucker shares her hope that a new generation of activists can learn from Lewis' courageous and peaceful fight for “beloved community.”

Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective.

How immigration enforcement and policing became entwined

Racism and sexism were bound together in the fight to vote – and Black women made it clear they would never cede the question of their voting rights to others.

What the late civil-rights leader and congressman taught the nation.

The Great Toppling of 2020 and the rebirth of civic imagination.

In 1918, Tom "Shotgun" Rogers earned himself a piece of baseball immortality—by killing a former teammate with a fastball.

In 1860, a novel paramilitary-style organization mobilized hundreds of thousands against the Southern planter class.