Excerpts

How the "census tract" came into being.

What happened to the former Main Street of Syrian America.

Benjamin Franklin, magnetic trees, and erotically-charged séances.

How mesmerism threatened early 19th-century gendered constructs of virtue and honor.

From Ansel Adams to Rebecca Norris Webb, we trace the symbiotic relationship that the parks and photography have developed over 150 years.

The differences between the global response to the Great Flu Pandemic and today’s COVID-19 outbreak could not be more striking.

Sanders was expressing broadly bipartisan enthusiasm for Soviet reform, not a love of authoritarianism.

In the antebellum South, the slave trader’s office was a site of desire.

What Shirley Chisholm can teach 2020 candidates as they exit.

Screwball comics wage a gleeful war on civilization and its discontents—armed mostly with water-pistols, stink bombs, and laughing gas.

We may not like it, but when it comes to U.S. politics, polarization may very well be part of the solution.

Reflections on the problems with progressives’ central principle that activist government is the only mechanism able to solve a modern society’s problems.

The overthrow of slavery in the US was a battle waged and won in the field of democratic mass politics; a battle that holds enormous lessons for radicals today.

How "Choose Your Own Adventure" books indoctrinated ‘80s children with the idea that success is simply the result of individual “good choices.”

Winning the South Carolina primary requires exciting a crucial constituency.

How the United States created the largest immigrant detention system in the world.

DNA, race, and native rights.

The first Americans weren't one group of people; they arrived at different times, and likely by different methods.

American Indians, the Civil War, and Confederate memory.

How America's corporations lost their public purpose.

Plantations are not "charming" or "tranquil" wedding venues. They were gruesome labor camps profiting off of enslaved labor.

Like it or not, the “Miracle on Ice” team has long allowed itself to be used by the worst actors in our politics.

It took a while for pundits and other observers to truly understand the power of the new platform.

For 400 years, Americans have argued that their violence is justified while the violence of others constitutes barbarism.

Films of the battle for Iwo Jima, digitized 75 years after they were made, offer lessons for Americans today.

The case for electing "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and Pete Rose to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

At a peaceful protest of Confederate imagery in the school in 1970, dozens of students were arrested, suspended, and the remainder expelled.

A now-famous Puritan sermon was nothing special in its own day.

Never-before-transcribed articles from Frederick Douglass’ Paper denounce capitalism and economic inequality.

A look back on the album that kick-started a worldwide movement, half a century since Ozzy Osbourne first bellowed, “What is this that stands before me?”

The problem of minority rule isn’t Trumpian or temporary; it’s bipartisan and enduring.

This information is crucial for getting the election right.

No, the Civil War didn’t end slavery, and the first Africans didn’t arrive in America in 1619.

Women are slightly better at hand-washing than men. Here’s one theory for why.

Don't let anyone tell you revolutionary history is boring.

The similarities between 2020 and 1972 are too astonishing to ignore. But there’s one big difference.

Redlining in Omaha began in the 1920s. Although outlawed in the 1960s, its effects are still present in the city's demographics.

Tracing its emergence of as a distinct cultural institution.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Its title, 'The Negro', seemed innocuous enough. But Malcolm X intended it to invoke a much harsher meaning.

Even Donald Trump’s most draconian and violent immigration policies are still circumscribed by the interests of capital.

The school has decided how much money we’re owed in reparations.

Mr. Peanut embodies two seemingly-distinct but deeply-connected Virginian worlds; he is a product of the state’s agricultural and aristocratic traditions.

The United States didn't begin in 1619.

In 1906, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Chicago to move forward with a spectacularly disgusting feat of modern engineering.

Samuel Freedman rereads 1975's "Blue-Collar Aristocrats."

Satellite images dating back to 1975 allow researchers to map how millions of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends have proliferated in street networks worldwide.

Ashley Boone Jr., the first black president of a major Hollywood studio, helped make Star Wars a hit, yet chances are you've never heard of him.

The results of the 1920 census kicked off a bitter, decadelong political squabble. Could the same happen again in 2020?

Six historians weigh in on the biggest misconceptions about black history, including the Tuskegee experiment and enslaved people’s finances.