Excerpts

Hamilton is an impossibly slippery text. The arguments over the show are part of what make it great.

Studying Hurricane Katrina as a discrete event is studying a fiction.

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.

The parallels between the summer of '32 and what is happening now are striking.

An excerpt from a new graphic biography of Jack Kirby, the "King of Comics."

Police reform is a time-honored counter-insurgency measure to quell rebellion.

A whole vision of history seems to be leaving the stage.

We all know, in the abstract, that Wilson was a white supremacist. But here’s how he wielded his racism against one accomplished Black American.

How a monument that championed black sacrifice in the name of emancipation was forgotten.

The tribal sovereignty movement from the late 1960s never really ended. To find the future of the Native left, look to the past.

Revisiting the contradictions in "Hamilton" – and in the pushback to criticisms of the beloved musical.

Has the celebrated musical eclipsed the man himself?

What seemed to enrage a former inmate most was the mutual consent of the men he lived with.

Why the “racial wealth gap” fails to explain economic inequality in black and white America.

Where does Edith Wharton's idea of innocence fall into our own world?

"Moonshine" is now a big thing in the liquor biz. But it takes a visit to West Virginia to get a sense of the complex stories in every barrel.

Like the museum behind it, the monument was designed in large part to train white people in a fundamentally racist way of seeing.

The National Statuary Collection announced the unification of the former slave economy’s emotional heartland with the heart of national government.

How the history of dispensationalism shapes U.S. foreign policy today.

Last week, the mayor announced that the city’s most prominent statue of Christopher Columbus would be removed “as soon as possible.”

Sometimes I learned more Black history in a week at home than I did in a lifetime of Februarys at school.

An 1813 correspondence demonstrates that medical expertise in early America was not limited to men or physicians.

Places of memory up and down the East Coast also witnessed acts of resistance and oppression.

The ideology of the men who celebrated the United States while fighting for its dissolution is still very much alive.

How African-Americans in Early America celebrated the Declaration of Independence's ideals, even as basic freedoms were denied to them.

For decades they covered up the U.S. massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere. This is why we never learn our lessons.

Tracing the history of the Grateful Dead folktale and the evolving obligations of being alive.

Generations of Asian Americans have struggled to prove an Americanness that should not need to be proven.

How calls for “real reforms” have resulted in measures that further shield police from real accountability.

A new book explores the history of the people who have been written out of the L.A. suburb's longtime origin story.

The author reflects on his own journey with Dylan, and shares some of his favorite pieces of Dylanology.

Myrlie Evers began to weep when she heard the Mississippi Legislature vote to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag.

Masks have a history associated with disease, status, gender norms, and more.

To hold the police accountable for misconduct, data related to police violence must not only become more accessible, it must also become more reliable.

A new book persuasively argues that the Federalists’ attempt to squash opposition and the free flow of ideas was even more nefarious than we thought.

After Governor Northam announced its removal, two Richmond historians reflect on the legacy of the Lee Monument.

In 1932, the “Bonus Army” of jobless veterans staged a protest in Washington, DC. The government dispersed them with tear gas.

Keep in mind what it meant to the people who created it.

Education campaigns for HIV/AIDS hold lessons for COVID-19.

Rap group N.W.A. understood vulgarity and controversy were necessary to draw attention to police brutality.

Trump’s family separation policy belongs to a much longer history of U.S. government forces taking children from families that don't match the American ideal.

For Baldwin, the past had always been bent in service of a lie. Could a true story be told?

The actual Confederate States of America was a repressive state devoted to white supremacy.

How allies abroad help the fight against racism at home.

The role of "big government" in American history.

Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions.

An investigation found that USDA promoted misleading historical data which ultimately cost black farmers land, money, and agency.

A celebration of emancipation in Texas is taking hold in the minds of Americans everywhere.

How a Texan holiday became a national tradition.

As white, southern troops raised the battle flag, they showed that they were fighting for change abroad—but the status quo at home.