Excerpts

Newspapers must be for the people. It’s worth investing our tax dollars in them.

Eric Foner reviews two new books that make the case against the Electoral College.

The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.

Vivian Gornick’s and Jodi Dean’s books mine a lost history of comradeship, determination, and intimacy.

J. Chester Johnson on the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919.

What 'the forgotten man of American conservatism' has to say about current debates on the right.

From the Illuminati to “COVID-19 is a lie,” how pandemics have produced contagions of fear.

Historians’ lectures provide material for improv comedians.

Three new books consider the life, and impact, of Franz Boas, the "father of American cultural anthropology."

Science doesn’t make you magically objective, and it’s not separate from the rest of human experience.

The public fascination was so intense that fans soon started demanding live reenactments.

A scholar of the history of race sets out on an exploration of his own family roots, and despite his better judgement, is moved by what he discovers.

For hundreds of years, doctors thought nostalgia was a disease. Now, it's a name for our modern condition.

The original “Zoom” burst joyfully out of Boston in the 1970s, and is still beloved by older members of Generation X.

A conversation with historian Marcus Rediker about multiracial mobs, history from below and the memory of struggle.

William Barr’s long struggle against congressional oversight.

An airstrike killed 11 people, including five children, in an assault on a Philadelphia black liberation group. Now a reconciliation effort is under way.

History shows that men have always been able to handle care work — when they have to.

Unlike cholera, physical and sensory proximity can spread COVID-19 among the populations most vulnerable to it.

In 1988, Jesse Jackson ran for president on a platform that included universalist policies like single-payer. His success terrified establishment Democrats.

By adopting middle-class aesthetics, the bar-basement bowling alley became the "poor man's country club."

Reflections on the life of Little Richard, the star who mistook a satellite for a ball of fire.

The bond market has fueled vast inequities between cities and suburbs — especially in smaller locales.

Jefferson envisioned land-use policies that he hoped would mitigate epidemics – and other urban evils.

In the middle of the biggest international crisis ever since, it’s time to admit what the war was—and wasn’t.

For hundreds of years, false theories of “innate difference and deficit in black bodies” have shaped American responses to disease.

As 19th century reformers showed, only a healthy workforce can fuel economic prosperity.

The deadly episode stood for a bitterly divided era. Did we ever leave it?

The shootings at Kent State and Jackson State at 50 years later.

What is the defining achievement of Barack Obama?

Did the Census Bureau's practice of collecting data on religious bodies violate the separation of church and state?

Being tough on crime and cutting benefits from the poor left millions more susceptible to disease.

In the Jim Crow South, the Alabama Communist Party distinguished itself as a champion of racial and economic justice.

What does the past sound like – and can listening to it help us understand history better?

On the beginnings of our stories—and the history of who owns them.

Over 100 years, a tactic first designed to keep workers happy morphed into a marketing strategy.

For the sake of justice and democracy, we need a progressive wealth tax.

A conversation with Mike Davis about what must be done to combat the COVID-19 pandemic – and all the other monsters still to come.

The war and its aftermath, from a Vietnamese perspective.

How did the struggle for emancipation become a mass politics?

Due to racist policies, Black Americans are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites, and nowhere more so than in St. Louis.

A new book suggests that the plague’s horrors haunt modernist literature between the lines.

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle has come to symbolize an era of muckraking and reform. But its author sought revolution, not regulation.

New York City is considering burying victims of Covid-19 in public parks, many of which were already built on top of burial grounds.

In his new book, Jon Mooallem tells the story of the Great Alaska Earthquake and Genie Chance, the woman whose voice on the radio held everyone together.

History is not kind to those who divide and dither.

Protecting the food supply chain means protecting workers.

The disease afflicted the author as he was writing what would become "The Innocents Abroad."

More than anything else, the Watsonville Canning strike was a fight against national oppression.

These women came ready to fight.