Excerpts

Outbreak narratives from past diseases can be influential in the way we think about the COVID pandemic.

Policing public health is likely to result in increased racial disparities.

A new release records the musician’s early metamorphosis—unmoored, broke, living for a time in an attic—when her lodestar was her big, strange, unwieldy talent.

Any true reckoning with racism must include our schools.

The backstory to the backstory of America’s mythic promise.

Historians say that a major milestone in the history of school integration is often left out of the civil rights story.

The largest civil rights demonstration in U.S. history was not in Little Rock. Or Selma. Or Montgomery. It happened in New York City.

In three centuries, the heresies of two bankers became the basis of our modern economy.

The pandemic is stress-testing two concepts Americans have historically gotten wrong.

Far from a marginal outsider, a new biography contends, Thorstein Veblen was the most important economic thinker of the Gilded Age.

For much of the twentieth century, African Americans embraced eugenics as a means of racial improvement.

Michael Prodger on the artists who make huge sums for painting the US flag.

Perpetual outsiders, Mormons spent 200 years assimilating to a certain national ideal—only to find their country in an identity crisis.

In the late 19th century, Black bartenders gained esteem in the North and South. But their experiences were very different — in ways that may defy assumptions.

Without justice for all, none of us are free.

A state with an often-overlooked history of enslavement demonstrates the lasting significance and geographic reach of the Haitian Revolution.

The genealogy site fails to understand the fundamental differences between white and black history.

How and why a Los Angeles folk artist created a vast array of intricate dioramas to form the African American Miniature Museum.

Julia Gaffield reviews two books that discuss the transatlantic slave trade.

From Alexander Hamilton to Richard Nixon and more: meddling, fixing, rigging, fraud, and violence.

On the 250th anniversary of the famous composer’s birth, the story of how his music first took hold across the Atlantic.

Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all illnesses—including COVID-19—are social problems for humans to solve.

Fears that teachers were indoctrinating kids were rampant in the 1950s. But the reality was more complicated.

Material benefits trumped FDR's terrible civil rights records.

With chatter about Texas leaving the union on the rise, two new books remind us what it was like the last time we tried to go it alone.

Ordinances, arrests, and celebrations during the influenza epidemic.

And the "gentleman" doctors who made them.

When I spoke with my boyhood hero 25 years after his famous home run, I learned why he’d kept going through the death threats and the hate.

Debunking the myth that the great national park was a wilderness untouched by humans

The vision of feminist labor organizing that guided the women’s white-collar organizing project 9to5 should still be our north star.

Absent social media, the artists of the past shaped public knowledge of historical events through illustrations.

Fears about “undeserving” people receiving public assistance have deep ties to racism and the policing of black women’s bodies.

From Bronze Age farmers to New World colonialists, the stories of struggle to claim more ground have shaped where and how we live.

In ACT UP, belonging was not conferred by blood. Care was offered when you joined others on the street with the intent to bring the AIDS crisis to an end.

In 1964, the John Birch Society was the most active far-right group in the United States—unless you count the Republican Party.

Only 15 nightlife spaces dedicated to queer and gay women remain in the United States

Lessons about organizing from the SNCC co-founder.

A return to the fairness doctrine wouldn't curb the damage caused by the far-right media ecosystem fueling much of America's conspiracy-driven politics.

We must be cautious of the inclination to find a “usable history” that proves those points we want to prove, that reinforces the lessons we want reinforced.

It's a sign of disrespect.

Thousands of pages of declassified records are available for anyone to peruse.

How a Gilded Age best seller shaped American race discourse.

How not to learn about the American past.

States have a legitimate way to influence national politics. Forcing their will on other states isn't it.

On the ten year anniversary of Aziz Rana's book, Henry Brooks interviews him on his influential book and what it might teach us about the legacies of populism.

Far from a partisan for free markets, the Founding Father insisted on the need for economic planning. We need more of that vision today.

An oral history with 25 fashion luminaries, highlighting a previously untold history of the AIDS crisis.

Research shows that visitors often ignore information that conflicts with what they already believe about history.

Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong.

The penny press of the nineteenth century was a revolution in newspapers—and is a salutary reminder of lost ties between reporters and readers.