Excerpts

Underground Railroad simulations have ignited controversy about whether they confront the country’s darkest history or trivialize its gravest traumas.

Uncovering the truth about the 1898 massacre of black voters in Wilmington, North Carolina.

A conversation about the roots of organized resistance to federal regulation of public lands in the American West.

More diverse regular history classes are the key to a historically literate population.

The modern conception of freedom emerged as an antidemocratic reaction by elites who wanted to curtail state power.

Appeals to childhood innocence helped enshrine undocumented kids’ access to education. But this has also inadvertently reinforced criminalization.

In 1880, a new generation helped decide the closest popular vote in U.S. history.

Radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

History is asking only one question right now as Trump refuses to concede. Will the Republicans decide they are no longer an American political party?

Ed Ayers visits public historians in Boston and Philadelphia and explores what “freedom” meant to those outside the halls of power in the Revolutionary era.

Ed Ayers visits the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and learns how public outcry inspired safety laws that revolutionized industrial work nationwide.

The Federal Theatre Project put dramatic artists to work — and we could do it again.

How a long-abandoned practice became a way for undocumented immigrants to seek protection.

How the founders settled on the system we love to hate today.

How the presumption of bystanders’ responsibility crystallized into the predominant opinion.

Over the first half of the 20th century, the movement galvanized groups throughout the Americas who helped inaugurate what we think of today as global feminism.

‘Struggle: From the History of the American People’ charts the strife of early US history in a fierce Cubist/Expressionist style.

The creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’ dramatized isolation and fear but still believed in the best of humanity.

Pittsburgh photographer Teenie Harris focused on the patriotism of men who fought for the country abroad while being discriminated against at home.

William Eggleston’s photographs of the South on the eve of the 1976 election captured an eerie quiet.

A new book on American punk paints the movement as the last gasp of left-wing cultural resistance in the 1980s.

'Freedom!' tried to show the horrors of antebellum slavery and the courage of escaping slaves. But neither schools nor audiences were ready for it.

"The Road to Unfreedom," Timothy Snyder's book on Russian influence around the world, is built on contradiction and conspiracy.

Comparing Trump's America to fascist Germany only fuels elites' antidemocratic fantasies.

How the U.S. government used veterans as atomic guinea pigs.

Black veterans were once targeted for racialized violence because of the equality with whites that their military service implied.

Black people emerged from the war bloodied and scarred. Still, the war marked a turning point in their struggles for freedom.

The chaotic quest to mythologize America’s past.

On the mournful threads connecting his half-century in politics.

Jaime Harrison lost to Lindsey Graham but expanded Democrats’ vision of what’s possible in the Deep South.

A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.

Today's housing crisis in San Francisco originates from zoning laws that segregated racial groups and income levels.

On the passage and enforcement of laws to exclude or deport immigrants for their beliefs, and the people who challenged those laws.

Procedures drive the bottom line in our medical system.

The forgotten crusade of Morris Milgram.

White families quickly recuperated financial losses after the Civil War, then created a Jim Crow credit system.

In many national crises, black Americans have been essential workers – but serving in crucial roles has not resulted in economic equality.

"The difference between here and the South is just that — it's hidden."

More than 50 years after redlining was outlawed, the legacy of discrimination can still be seen in California’s poorest large city.

Who were Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the rest of the first 16 US presidents, what did they do, and what do they hope history has forgotten?

When public opinion favored sheltering youth from adult society, the Freeville Republic immersed them in carefully designed models of that society instead.

Before and during the Civil War, both enslavers and abolitionists used photography to garner support for their causes.

Biden will take over a country facing myriad challenges. And Trump's lame-duck period could be one of the most treacherous in American history.

American toilet-building and the continuities of colonial and postcolonial development.

How early blues musicians processed the toll taken by tornadoes, floods, and other disasters that displaced them from their communities.

What if there is a vaccine, but not everyone gets it? Exploring the lessons of the polio vaccine's shortcomings as we address a new public health crisis today.

An excerpt from the diary of presidential hopeful at the outset of the contested election of 1876.

The replacement of fountain pens was a stroke of design genius perfectly in time for the era of mass production.

The history of suffrage in the South—indeed, the nation—is messy and fraught, and more contentious than is typically remembered.

Lessons about “dark age cruelty” and the limits of reformism from 90 years ago.