Excerpts

Horseback travel time is only part of the story.

Once the COVID crisis is over, it may take us quite some time to process and psychologically recover from this tragedy.

The artists of our time, with their ruin-porn coffee-table books, offer the world a glossy, anesthetized image of abandoned infrastructure from Chernobyl to Detroit.

Throughout American history, philanthropy has involved the offering of time, money and moral concern to benefit others, but it carries a complicated legacy.

The activists of the 1990s worked so diligently that they were written out of history.

Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America, embodying both its tumult and its promise.

The collapse of John C. Calhoun's statue created a sound not unlike artillery in the war he influenced.

The intertwining of white flour, nutrition science, and profit.

Katherine Fite and the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, 1945.

The fight between Biden and conservative Catholics will be about more than policy.

Enslaved.org will allow anyone to search for individual enslaved people around the globe in one central online location.

It’s been two hundred years since America’s first sci-fi novel was published. But who wrote it?

A food writer cracks into the power of food memories and what deviled eggs might tell us about who we are and who we might become.

How scientific thought informed colonization and religious conversion during the Age of Discovery.

Why removing the names of Confederates from military bases matters.

The militant abolitionist's execution set a precedent for armed resistance against the federal government with implications for those who had condemned him.

Jack Kennedy, we hardly know ye—and to know ye is not to love ye.

The West and the nation need worthier, more honest memorials.

Many Americans were living under quarantines, and officials warned people to stay home for the holiday.

In his time, the 16th president drew comparisons to a famous tightrope walker.

Alex Winter’s new documentary about the musician fails to capture his deeply conventional streak.

At 91, Harrison Ruffin Tyler demonstrates that "long ago" wasn't so long ago.

How does color influence our perception of time?

Gustavus Stadler on Nora Belle Guthrie's battle with Huntington's Disease.

Americans are no more selfish in 2020 than they were in the 1940s, the difference between the two moments is about national leadership, not national character.

Like cigarette manufacturers decades ago, e-cigarette makers have pitched their products as fun and safe. But nobody knows what the risks are.

An unearthed guest register from the Catskill Mountain House sheds light on the artists who spent the night there.

Yellowtail, the first Crow registered nurse, fought for the inclusion of Native medicine and healing knowledge in reservation hospitals.

They were not the nation's first settlers, but they were the most fractious.

Cynical public speech aimed at winning political power has consequences.

How Mexico—and the fugitives who went there—helped make freedom possible in America.

Natural language processing reveals huge differences in how Texas history textbooks treat men, women, and people of color.

How gender and power collide in food media and culture.

And history says they have a reason to be.

Explore maps of 142 cities to see the lingering harms of the racist lending policies known as redlining.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories can foment violence and thwart democracy.

Ed Ayers visits the site where the transcontinental railroad was completed. He considers the project's human costs, and discovers how the environment and photography played key roles on the rails.

The movement for school desegregation took some of its first steps with a student strike in rural Virginia. Ed Ayers learns about those who made it happen.

Richmond was the epicenter of black finance. What happened there explains the decline of black-owned banks across the country.

How the President could endanger the official records of one of the most consequential periods in American history.

On the Black labor organizers who fought for civil rights after Reconstruction and through the twentieth century.

Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers.

White women were as married to the war as their Confederate menfolk.

Activists concerned about pandemic-related homelessness are seeking rent relief. In the 1930s, tenants banded together against evictions.

What does the way we mourn, remember, and care for our dead say about us?

How the preeminent photographic record of the period excluded people of color from the nation’s self-image.

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

"Rethinking Rufus" argues that enslaved black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women.

Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.