Excerpts

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.

Illuminating a path forward.

In June, Ohio legislators refused to ban confederate memorabilia from county fairs. The state has long had a complicated relationship with the Confederacy.

The long history behind the Army's Jim Crow forts.

Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.

When Nicholson Baker searched for the truth about biological weapons, he found a fog of redaction.

They understood that revolution means dismantling old power structures, violently if necessary.

Fighting for the soul of American space policy.

In the turbulent 1970s, the balm of pop cultural nostalgia set the tone for today's political reaction.

Modern policing is linked to overseas colonial projects of conquest, occupation, and rule. Demilitarization requires uprooting that worldview.

The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., has become a flashpoint in today’s reckoning with racist statues.

Revisiting John Hersey's groundbreaking "Hiroshima."

A series of graphs that help explain why at least 830 monuments were erected many decades after the end of the Civil War.

The role of almanacs in nineteenth-century popular medicine.

In times that feel “unprecedented,” it is all the more important to use history as a way to understand the present and chart a path to the future.

During the Civil War, Union soldiers in the West weren’t fighting to end slavery, but to annihilate and remove Native Americans.

As innovations go, the Good Humor vehicle is as sweet as it gets.

Despite our long history of interrogating the memorial landscape, no movement has been able to dislodge it.

Locked-down parents will need an army of tween child-minders. Let "The Baby-Sitters Club" show them the way.

Is being "political" the central force in our identities?

Ideologues of left and right have learned to stop worrying and love rhetorical violence.

What were the religious beliefs of the American founding generation? What do they mean for us today?

There is a conversation about race that white families are just not having. This is mine. 

Social Darwinism from AIDS to Covid-19.

“I ask: what’s been left out of the historical record of my South and my nation? What is the danger in not knowing?”

A new book systematically defends the American Founding against those who believe it was destined to end in nihilism.

Hamilton is an impossibly slippery text. The arguments over the show are part of what make it great.

Studying Hurricane Katrina as a discrete event is studying a fiction.

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.

The parallels between the summer of '32 and what is happening now are striking.

An excerpt from a new graphic biography of Jack Kirby, the "King of Comics."

Police reform is a time-honored counter-insurgency measure to quell rebellion.

A whole vision of history seems to be leaving the stage.

We all know, in the abstract, that Wilson was a white supremacist. But here’s how he wielded his racism against one accomplished Black American.

How a monument that championed black sacrifice in the name of emancipation was forgotten.

The tribal sovereignty movement from the late 1960s never really ended. To find the future of the Native left, look to the past.

Revisiting the contradictions in "Hamilton" – and in the pushback to criticisms of the beloved musical.

Has the celebrated musical eclipsed the man himself?

What seemed to enrage a former inmate most was the mutual consent of the men he lived with.

Why the “racial wealth gap” fails to explain economic inequality in black and white America.