Excerpts

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

A visit with three of the last polio survivors in the U.S. who still depend on iron lungs.

The video game offers a realistic portrayal of illness and public health in the 19th-century American West.

A schoolteacher created the popular board game, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, for quarantined children.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

The artist’s Saturday Evening Post covers championed a retrograde view of America. In the 1960s, he had a change of heart.

Jerry Mitchell revisits a dark episode in the struggle for civil rights.

A "test tube baby" grapples with the dark corners of 20th century reproductive technologies.

It has little to do with what happened in 1915, and everything to do with Cold War-era geopolitics in the Middle East.

The city sought to sell bonds to pay for the war effort, while bringing its citizens together during the infamous pandemic

19th-century Americans abandoned the English phrasing of "standing" for election and begin to describe candidates who "run" for office. The race was on.

Plan Colombia functioned like an ideological laboratory for forever war in the twenty-first century.

A century before today’s celebrity health gurus, an American businesswoman was a beauty with a brand.

Refocusing the study of the Civil War on the West shows that events out west were not simply “noteworthy”; they were emblematic.

This post is a part of our “Faith in Revolution” series, which explores the ways that religious ideologies and communities shaped the revolutionary era.

The historian Frank M. Snowden discusses the politics of restricting travel during epidemics and more.

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are the icons of an ideological split among today’s Democrats, echoing a similar split in the Republican party of 1964.

When first-term Representative Leon Sacks of Pennsylvania introduced H.R. 6546 on April 21, 1937, the Earth did not stop spinning. But it almost did.

The paper’s series on slavery made avoidable mistakes. But the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous.

How the forgotten fight for the West exposes the meaning of the Confederate flag.

The last British monarch to reign over the American colonies had a collection of more than 55,000 maps, each with their own story to tell.

A new biography and TV show present Emily Dickinson as a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.

Conspiracy theories have been a central feature in American politics since before the Revolution.

Biden convinced small-government Republicans to increase spending in the War on Crime.

From Amelia Earhart to Michelle Obama, meet 100 women who defined the last century.

Having a single candidate by the time of the convention has been a key stepping stone for a party’s victory. But it hasn't always worked out that way.

The Civil War started with a surrender, ended with a series of surrenders, and had several of its major campaigns end in surrender.

On Hosea Easton’s and David Walker’s attempts to debunk scientific racism.

Bernie Sanders pushed a measure through the House to require drugs funded by public research funds to be sold at a reasonable cost. The Senate shot it down.

How the "census tract" came into being.

What happened to the former Main Street of Syrian America.

Benjamin Franklin, magnetic trees, and erotically-charged séances.

How mesmerism threatened early 19th-century gendered constructs of virtue and honor.

From Ansel Adams to Rebecca Norris Webb, we trace the symbiotic relationship that the parks and photography have developed over 150 years.

The differences between the global response to the Great Flu Pandemic and today’s COVID-19 outbreak could not be more striking.

Sanders was expressing broadly bipartisan enthusiasm for Soviet reform, not a love of authoritarianism.

In the antebellum South, the slave trader’s office was a site of desire.

What Shirley Chisholm can teach 2020 candidates as they exit.

Screwball comics wage a gleeful war on civilization and its discontents—armed mostly with water-pistols, stink bombs, and laughing gas.

We may not like it, but when it comes to U.S. politics, polarization may very well be part of the solution.

Reflections on the problems with progressives’ central principle that activist government is the only mechanism able to solve a modern society’s problems.

The overthrow of slavery in the US was a battle waged and won in the field of democratic mass politics; a battle that holds enormous lessons for radicals today.

How "Choose Your Own Adventure" books indoctrinated ‘80s children with the idea that success is simply the result of individual “good choices.”

Winning the South Carolina primary requires exciting a crucial constituency.

How the United States created the largest immigrant detention system in the world.

Reviving race science plays into centuries of oppression.

The first Americans weren't one group of people; they arrived at different times, and likely by different methods.

American Indians, the Civil War, and Confederate memory.

How America's corporations lost their public purpose.

Plantations are not "charming" or "tranquil" wedding venues. They were gruesome labor camps profiting off of enslaved labor.