Excerpts

The founding generation revised the country’s history to make the new nation work.

The idea that justices exist outside of politics is a relatively new concept.

High-stakes debates put candidates in the hot seat. But are they helpful to voters?

Exploring the economic mobility of 11,172 middle class families over a 50-year period.

Jon Sternfeld on collective memory and history as instruction.

A U.S. intelligence officer reflects on the moral corruption of an open-ended occupation.

Delivering the mail used to be sexy and thrilling. It can be once more.

Marginalized women of color have long seen their reproductive freedom limited.

Who should be allowed to profit from depictions of traumatic events in Black history?

Nikole Hannah-Jones gives the credit for ending quotas to civil rights reformers. The truth is a bit more complicated.

U.S. democracy and the U.S. postal service share a long, entangled history. An attack against one signals an attack against the other.

A contested presidential election in 1876 produced a devastating compromise.

A lawsuit against Harvard University demands the return of an ancestor’s stolen image.

On September 21, 1976, he was assassinated by a car bomb in the heart of Washington, DC.

A majority of the estimated 675,000 American deaths from the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 occurred during the second wave.

Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel?

The heart-tug tactics of 1950s ads steered white American women away from activism into domesticity. They’re still there.

The American Historical Association's executive director reflects on the purpose of history education.

No, Trump can’t rewrite school curriculums himself, but a thousand mini-Trumps on the nation’s school boards can.

A collection of resources challenging the notion that the U.S. was built on nothing but injustice and subjugation.

As Lincoln recognized, it's not enough to question the decisions, justices, or even the structure of the Court. We need to challenge the foundation of its power.

Setting up a classroom battle between 1619 and 1776 gets history totally wrong and is damaging for our nation.

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concludes an era of faith in courts as partners in the fight for progress and equality.

The rise and fall of the Brooks Brothers name.

Despite her path-braking work as a litigator before the Court, she doesn't believe that large-scale social change should come from the courts.

But it’s one historians know all too well.

I learned, while writing about her, that her precision disguised her warmth.

The president has blamed schools for spurring the unrest in several U.S. cities that has led in some cases to looting and fires.

The 50-year effort to advance a conservative legal agenda.

Generations of readers have chosen to emphasize Thoreau's spiritual communion with Nature, but Walden begins with trenchant critique of “progress.”

The link between medical abuse, racism and immigration runs deep.

Hearing about backlash to what kids are learning in U.S. History classrooms? It could have been last week—or 150 years ago.

Every statue defends an idea about history, but what if those ideas are wrong?

Juxtaposing contemporary public health data with 1930s redlining maps reveals one of the legacies of urban racial segregation.

Using one’s buying power to support causes one believes in and to effect change is not new.

Richard J. Werther discusses how being outmanned by the best army in the world led American revolutionaries to look overseas for the help they needed.

"How long can it go on?"

Many prisons, especially in the South, are named after racist officials and former plantations.

On William Gibson, Sonic Youth, and the genesis of the American suburb.

“Megafires” are now a staple of life in the Pacific Northwest, but how we talk about them illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself.

After two decades in a filing cabinet and three next to a parking lot in Baltimore, the author returns to New York.

Langston Hughes, "poet laureate of Harlem," dreamed of an America that lived up to its ideals.

When a converted ice cream wagon blew up in Wall Street, it was the loudest burst in a war between the Federal government and American Anarchists.

Newly added to Netflix, the Civil War movie reminds the nation that black Americans fought for their own emancipation.

The story of William Higginbotham & the Black community in Civil War Rome.

As was the case in 200 years ago, this summer's relentless pyrotechnics may not be meaningless acts of an unthinking mob.

Calling QAnon a "cult" or "religion" hides how its practices are born of deeply American social and political traditions.

Expanding campus police forces’ power threatens to increase surveillance.

Since its invention in 1743, roller skating has been tied to Black social movements.

Because the 19th-century college president appeared white, he was able to climb the ladder of the Jesuit community.