Excerpts

An excerpt from a new book reveals how Disneyland came to be.

Twenty years ago, demonstrations against the World Trade Organization opened the space for today’s critics of neoliberal capitalism.

The U.S. government orchestrated the roundup of people of Japanese descent in 12 Latin American countries, citing “hemispheric security."

The fees could rise nearly 500 percent for files documenting the arrival of millions of immigrants to the U.S. between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries

For nearly two decades, US leaders have sounded a constant refrain: We're making progress in Afghanistan. They weren't, documents show, and they knew it.

How a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class.

Keeping the faith in a community facing extinction.

In order to understand America, we have to understand the struggles of the black working class.

Decades of militarization in U.S. foreign policy have fueled violence at every level of American society.

Weekly shows on local TV stations helped make the ironic viewing of bad movies into a national pastime.

The American Descendants of Slavery movement combines a left-wing critique of America’s founding with a distinctly right-wing strain of xenophobia.

A new curriculum from the American Indian Museum brings greater depth and understanding to the long-misinterpreted history of indigenous culture.

The founder of cultural anthropology, Franz Boas challenged the reigning notions of race and culture.

Breaking with party unity can be costly. In the 1950's, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine faced backlash after she condemned McCarthy, a fellow Republican.

In 1997, the former Soviet leader needed money, and Pizza Hut needed a spokesman. Greatness ensued.

For Nixon stalwarts on the House Judiciary Committee, defending the President became an inalterable epitaph.

Fifty years ago this week, a squad of Chicago police officers killed Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

Does the most historically minded school of constitutional law push history aside?

The constitutional standard for impeachment is different from what’s at play in a regular criminal trial.

It wasn’t simply a static symbol – the “blade” actually moved.

For nearly 200 years after the founding of New York, the city struggled to establish a clean source of fresh water.

How the United States became the world’s police force.

Eric Foner has helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.

A new three-part PBS documentary explores the failure of Reconstruction and the Redemption of the South.

The first frozen Tofurky meal was a hard sell with retailers and a mad success with the customers who managed to find it.

A conversation with food historian Andrew F. Smith on his new book, "The Turkey: An American Story."

"I look back now and realize I was teaching a lot of misconceptions."

The revolutionaries were fighting against arbitrary power and for checks and balances.

A new book asks how music criticism can reckon with the lives of immoral artists.

Democrats need to face up to their constitutional duty without fear.

“The country cannot prosper if its cities are decaying.”

It's all about an agenda — and it's nothing new.

Collecting seashells is as old as humanity. What we do with them can reveal who we are, where we’re from, and what we believe.

A new Trump administration proposal would undermine the rights of all workers and harm asylum seekers.

Recently declassified documents constitute a gruesome and sadistic catalog of state terrorism.

In 2011, Citigroup published a 300-page 200th anniversary commemoration Celebrating the Past, Defining the Future. Is it a past to celebrate?

How one monument came to be at the center of Minnesota’s imagined white past.

A political neophyte delivered a speech from note cards — and made history.

In the Watergate era, high-level aides prevented Nixon’s abuses of power. Trump’s underlings can do the same.

Since the invention of the automobile, police have used the dangers of America's roads to justify their growing oversight of motorists.

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

Ben Marks on all that came of one interview in 1994.

The University of Virginia was supposed to transform a slave-owning generation, but it failed.

Southern legal codes included parallel language pairing “master and slave” and “husband and wife.”

A hundred years ago, the Palmer Raids imperilled thousands of immigrants. Then a wily official got in the way.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, he dreamed of a pluralist utopia.

Mo Rocca on the struggle to depathologize homosexuality.

What I saw as the editor of “The Art of the Deal,” the book that made the future President millions of dollars and turned him into a national figure.

From colonial times to the nineteenth century, Thanksgiving was very different from the holiday we know now.

Few people know about the movement to kidnap free black Americans and traffic them into slavery. It's time to change that.