Excerpts

The "Red Scare" echo in the Kimmel suspension.

Chief Justice John Roberts has now overseen 20 years of increasingly illiberal rulings by the Supreme Court.

Redford’s legacy as an environmental activist and his 1992 film "Sneakers" reveal his foresight on climate, politics, and surveillance.

In 1969, Otis Moss Jr led a push to ensure diversity among Santa Clauses. But the fight, he says, continues to this day.

What roles did SF State play in the broader upsurge in LGBTQ student and faculty activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

They rejected kings and were sincerely concerned about the possibility of a dictatorship. But we need to move past founder-worship and focus on justice.

Justice John Marshall’s ruling on Marbury v. Madison gave the courts the right to declare acts and laws of the other branches unconstitutional.

International relations and foreign influence helped end legal segregation of Mexican American students in California after World War II.

The first American woman to establish an independent architectural practice, Minerva Parker Nichols built an unprecedented career in Philadelphia.

A brief history of our most rebellious musical genre, as seen through its DIY zines.

There’s a lot more to Founding Father John Dickinson than not signing the Declaration of Independence.

Invented in 1922, water-skiing quickly became shorthand for American ideas on beauty, athleticism, and affluence.

The twentieth century saw America discard representative government when it comes to war.

On Ralph Waldo Emerson, his childhood in Boston, and his thoughts on mortality.

Gouverneur Morris wrote the preamble to the Constitution. Later in life, he rejected the foundational document as a failure.

On the role that medical and health professionals played in raising suspicions of The Twist.

James R. Schlesinger was only head of the CIA for six months, but he nevertheless ranks as the least popular director in the agency’s history.

If we dismiss concepts because of particular examples of misuse, we encourage the repression of discomforting histories and ideas.

The radical lives of James Baldwin.

The Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Spanish Civil War offered Melva L. Price an opportunity to examine the links between racism and fascism.

A Q&A with the author of "America, América: “A New History of the New World.”

The term “white trash” once was used to disparage poor white people. In the Civil Rights era, its meaning shifted to support business-friendly racial politics.

Using the antiquated language of "vagrancy," Trump Administration officials are tapping into a long history of policing.

A baseball’s forgotten pioneer was MLB’s third Black player. A war hero and gifted hitter, his troubled life defied the halo.

Newly discovered documents reveal Robert McNamara’s private doubts about Vietnam.

The centuries-long debate over who and what college is for has yet to be resolved.

College football’s NIL era has freed athletes but fueled chaos, soaring costs, and fan backlash.

Joyce Johnson on the friendship between two famous outsiders.

Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Cowley, and the difficult birth of "On the Road."

The murals at Croatian Catholic Church of St. Nicholas in Millvale do indeed have an implicit politics that was intimately familiar to the congregation.

In correspondence with an abolitionist in London, the great American orator didn’t hold back when talking about Abraham Lincoln, or the maligned Andrew Johnson.

A new book reveals systematic, profitable, and deadly arson schemes perpetrated by landlords and insurance companies in the Bronx.

A personal exploration through Indigenous history and the importance of names.

The Thrilla in Manila nearly killed Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

On Pascal Covici, the editor who nurtured some of the most iconic names in literature.

How the vineyards of Bordeaux led to the wall of separation between church and state.

To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism we must look in unconventional places.

My investigation spanned continents, centuries, and the bounds of good taste.

No one remembers the assassination of Congressman James M. Hinds. What do we risk by making it just another part of American history?

Long before it was fashionable, Amelia Bloomer pioneered what would later be dubbed "respectability politics."

The FBI reads James Baldwin.

What could be more purgative, more exhilaratingly American to the MAGA base than avenging the nation with racial warfare?

Meet Clio, a pedagogical tool that doubles as a travel app to get people hooked on learning history.

Cities across the American West are issuing belated apologies for 19th-century expulsions of Chinese residents, but their meaning and audience remain uncertain.

History suggests that uncivil discourse, while dangerous at times, has always been a defining feature of American democracy.

Today, Silicon Valley is still arguing Stanford's 1989 debate over hate speech.

The Trump administration is ordering the removal of information on slavery at multiple national parks in an effort to scrub them of “corrosive ideology.”

On new biographies of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger.

Thomas Paine nearly died quarantined off in Philadelphia in 1774. Then a Loyalist doctor nursed him back to health.

In a new memoir, Susan Cheever searches for the wellspring of her father’s genius.