Excerpts

The 1898 Wilmington insurrection showed “how people could get murdered in the streets and no one held accountable for it.”

Pioneering cartoonists were experimental, satiric, erotic, and artistically ambitious.

How difficult was it to obtain artificial light before the 19th century? Well...

For decades, the Republican Party has used what's known as "the Southern Strategy" to win white support in the region.

A new biography of the pioneering doctors shows why “first” can be a tricky designation.

We must remember the very real challenges to the preservation of our democracy.

From covid-19 to the 2020 election, the specter of America’s racist history influences many aspects of our lives.

There’s no reason we can’t have universal childcare that’s wildly popular and provides high-quality care — in fact, during World War II, we did.

As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law,” declared the man who would be America’s sixteenth president.

Disunion is hardly a new theme in American politics. In this moment of tumult, it would be unwise to rule out its return.

This op-ed celebrates the life and legacy of economist, attorney, and civil rights advocate Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander.

By the end of his life, inspired by the radicalism of the Black Panthers, Baldwin was again ready to proclaim himself a socialist.

After the Capitol was cleared of insurrectionists on January 6, it wasn't lost on many that cleaning up the mess would fall largely to Black and Brown people.

Then as now, not many people were willing to raise their own voices to defend the speech of a vulgarian spewing hate over a mass medium.

The aesthetics of virtual reality, and its promise of “magical” embodied experience, can be found in older experiments with immersive media.

The storming of the Capitol was an expression of the antidemocratic strands in American history.

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

The answer can change over time.

Unlike our car dashboards, covid-19 dashboards do not give individuals actionable information.

When the D.C. Metropolitan Police failed to catch a murder suspect, white residents criticized and mocked. Black residents worried.

Over the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.

The devastating cruelties these stories reveal also contain a fundamental truth about prison.

A new book frames this country’s tendency toward state-sanctioned murder as a unique cultural inheritance.

How a personal connection to Nick Carraway inspired the author to write the novel "Nick."

From "insurrection" to "rebellion" to "Civil War," finding a name for the conflict was always political.

A new proposal for reparations for slavery raises three critical questions: How much does America owe? Where will the money come from? And who gets paid?

Decades of discrimination in Fresno laid the groundwork for a housing crisis today.

By neglecting the history of the Black diaspora, Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" fails to reckon with systems of racial capitalism.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

When poetry met power in January, 1961.

Oil companies like to point to the demise of the whaling industry as an example of market-based energy solutions. The reality is much more complicated.

Down and dirty in eighteenth-century London and Boston.

The 1960s and 70s were a time of activism in the U.S., and therefore a fertile time for campus newspapers and the alternative press.

In Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience, people believed they were giving shocks to others. But did their compliance say much about the Nazis?

Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Andre Dawson and Derek Jeter sit down to discuss the Black gap in baseball.

The storming of the Capitol on 6 January was not a coup. But American democracy is still in danger.

The oval office looks different now that President Biden is its occupant.

On the HBO Max streaming service, with their skipped numbers, the episodes omitted from the 31 seasons of Looney Tunes are easy to spot.

Historian John Turner tells the story of Plymouth Colony with nuance and care.

The 1776 Commission marks the depth of right-wing commitment to ideological pseudo-history that can be used to shut down meaningful conversation about racism.

Sci-fi has long provided an outlet for socialist thinkers — offering readers a break from capitalist realism and allowing us to imagine a different world.

Peeples helps us to see that Poe’s imagination was stoked by his external surroundings as well as by his interior life.

A new biography of William Tecumseh Sherman questions his reputation as the brutal "prophet of total war."

Johnny Cash grappled with the many facets of the outlaw archetype in his feature acting debut, Five Minutes to Live.

Was he or wasn't he a member of the Communist Party USA?

A musicological conversation about the history and social value of Black music.

The ideals of the Confederate South found new force in the bloody plains of the American West.

While Herbert Hoover was deeply critical of his successor, he put aside his differences to ensure the peaceful and democratic transition of power.