Excerpts

A brief history of death tolls.

Restrictionists have long sought to cut U.S. immigration — to zero.

What changes each decade, what stays the same, and what do the questions say about American culture and society?

Revisiting the public health lessons learned during the 1918–1919 pandemic and reflecting on their relevance for the present.

One of the world's first mass deportations, bureaucratically managed and large-scale, took place on American soil.

Watching disease spread and kill on slave ships.

In "Race for Profit," Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor walks us through the ways racist housing policy survived the abolition of redlining.

In the 1790s a plague struck the new American nation and killed thousands. Noah Webster told the story of pandemics and invented a field.

Lessons from another time of great disillusionment.

COVID-19 has taught us all just how frayed our social safety net has become, and how its holes make us all more vulnerable.

In addition to COVID-19, another pandemic is preying upon the human spirit, nourished by a vulgar bigotry that has gone viral.

It was 1921, and it changed the character of the United States for decades.

Weariness of strong government is a key American tradition. But equally important is the revolutionary idea that national governance should come from the states.

While worrying about our food supply, we must also worry about workers producing it.

The radical and reactionary currents of New York at the turn of the 20th century.

Coronavirus songwriting has gone as global as the pandemic itself, creating a new genre called pandemic pop. It’s a tradition with a long history.

"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, and avalanches; but he cannot save them from fools—only Uncle Sam can do that."

Reflections on the ahistorical, aristocratic, and romanticist approach to "nature" elevated by John Muir, and by his admirer, Ken Burns.

The diary has been distorted by even her greatest champions. Would history have been better served if it had been destroyed?

Decades after the war, a group of prosecutors and historians discovered the truth about a mysterious SS training camp in occupied Poland.

Reading Silent Spring today, in the hazy reddish glow of climate catastrophe, is both an exhilarating and a melancholy pleasure.

The Chinese Hospital in San Francisco is still one-of-a-kind.

But the COVID-19 pandemic exposes its weaknesses.

Before Earth Day made a name for the environmental movement, a massive oil spill put a spotlight on the dangers of pollution.

How a scholarship helped — and didn't help — descendants of victims of the 1923 Rosewood racial massacre.

Lessons from a century ago.

Just like today, brass and bureaucrats ignored warnings, and sent troops overseas despite the consequences.

Visiting the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

The afterlife of Vivian Gornick's "The Romance of American Communism" shows that we bear the weight of dead generations—and sometimes living ones, too.

In 1625, New England’s “hideous and desolate” isolation suddenly began to seem a God-given blessing in disguise.

Naming the first people to fall sick often leads to abuse.

If the Democratic Party won’t listen to the left, it should at least listen to itself from 30 years ago.

We’re repeating a lot of the same mistakes from the 1918 “Spanish Flu” H1N1 outbreak.

That the federal government created this health care system for merchant mariners in the early American republic will surprise many.

J.B. Jackson’s 1976 essay on the evolution of the American garage displays his rare ability to combine deep erudition with eloquent and plainspoken analysis.

Myspace changed the way we discovered music and fell apart after conquering the world.

Social distancing isn’t a new idea—it saved thousands of American lives during the last great pandemic.

“Growing your own vegetables is great; beating Nazis is great. I think we’re all nostalgic for a time when anything was that simple.”

Official responses to the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 shows that the refusal to accept responsibility can have catastrophic consequences.

On Rousas Rushdoony's political thought and lasting influence on the Christian right.

The conversation around race after Hurricane Katrina echoed discourse from another New Orleans disaster 150 years before.

Good thing he had other talents.

What 1619 has become to the history of American slavery, 1688 is to the history of American antislavery.

Four new books show how different, and maybe also why.

The forgotten environmental action that pointed the path forward for the left.

Suspending his presidential campaign might be the best way to advance Sanders’s movement, but it could leave some supporters bitter.

A very real story of southern degradation and decay that made national headlines in the fall of 1932.

It was a lesson they'd learned from experience.

The lessons of the 1918 flu pandemic.

A look at how Jim Crow affected the treatment of African Americans fighting the Spanish flu.