Excerpts

Remembering "Hiroshima," the story that changed everything.

How many people really died because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings? It’s complicated. There are at least two credible answers.

Why was a second bomb used against Japan, so soon after Hiroshima? A review of several theories.

Comedy from Mad Magazine to The Simpsons.

Whether it’s happening or not.

Beneath the popular folk song, “Swannanoa Tunnel” and the railroad tracks that run through Western North Carolina is a story of blood, greed, and obfuscation.

In “Radical Hamilton,” Christian Parenti argues that the left should use Alexander Hamilton’s mythologized status to drive home his full agenda.

Government investment into a cancer vaccine had drawbacks.

Most recent scholarship, while supporting the view that the policy was vicious, has not addressed the question of genocide.

In fact, Black activists and civil rights leaders have been advocating for compensation for the trauma and cost of slavery for centuries.

Fleeing the Haitian revolution, whites and free blacks were viewed with suspicion by American slaveholders, including Thomas Jefferson.

The denigration of kitsch betrays a latent anti-Catholicism, one born from centuries of class and ethnic divisions.

The unusual union of a renowned artist and the discoverer of the Polio vaccine.

The movement for racial equality echoes the vision of the “August First Day” holiday.

Rick Perlstein’s epic series shows political history and cultural history cannot be disentangled.

It would be a grave mistake to ignore the link between Wilson’s white supremacy at home and his racist militarism abroad.

How dogs permeated slave societies and bolstered European ambitions for colonial expansion and social domination.

The U.S. just can't seem to let go of its naval base on Cuba.

On Paul Ortiz’s “African American and Latinx History of the United States.”

A rebellion against French colonial rule in 1791 led to a new kind of society.

For a long time, European historians paid little attention to the extraordinary series of events that now goes by the name of the Haitian Revolution.

How an African instrument got a racist reinvention.

The authoritarian tactics we’ve exported around the world in the name of national security are now being deployed in Portland.

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.