Excerpts

When Jim Obergefell and his partner John Arthur decided to marry after more than 20 years together, their home state refused to recognize same-sex marriages.

The Native activist spent nearly fifty years in prison for the killing of two F.B.I. agents. In January, Joe Biden commuted his sentence, and he went home.

How did the concept become the solution to society’s most deeply entrenched problems?

A new state law forbids education increasing ‘awareness’ of issues relating to race. How are educators supposed to teach history?

St Louis organizer Bill Sentner led some of the most successful labor battles in Midwestern history by uniting workers across race and gender lines.

In the 1960s, amid the shipping industry's decline, the empty piers became a site for cruising and creativity for gay men in particular.

A group of early 20th-century Catholics sought to impose their standards of morality onto the growing and scandal-ridden Hollywood film industry.

1988 was a pivotal year in how “white liberals” are perceived by their fellow Americans.

The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism.

How one book shaped the way the NPS interpreted the Civil War.

June 25 marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. But the truth is that the US was a willing partner in mass murder across the peninsula.

In Skrmetti, the Court turned to a decades-old decision once thought to be consigned to history.

Survivors of the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still fighting for recognition.

Undermining international oceans governance could damage American interests.

Viewed purely in terms of statistics, the recycling of the Gilded Age moniker makes sense, but comparison masks what’s unique about today’s inequality crisis.

Florida’s new school chaplain law invites a constitutional crisis as DeSantis bars some religions, defying First Amendment protections on religious liberty.

Culture-shocked Americans in the 1960s were all too happy to take directions from the John Birch Society: take an extreme right and drive forever.

How did freedom become synonymous with having lots of options?

Advocates of “military Keynesianism” present it as a boon for the working class. In reality, it diverts resources away from social provision.

"Although the lesson of progressivism took a while to sink in, over time Grinnell resolved to do whatever he could to forestall the sundering of his world."

As Grand Canyon National Park celebrates its centennial, it’s worth recalling the peculiar way the canyon became grand.

Westerville became the heart of the Prohibition movement, deploying everything from hymns to bombs to keep their town dry.

Israel is attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, but Tehran’s secret path was blazed by the Israelis.

Margaret Fuller was a polymathic intellect and writer, simultaneously ahead of her time and deeply enmeshed in the social and political fabric of her era.

Religious leaders hid behind the separation of church and state to uphold the institution of slavery and the forcible removal of Native Americans.

The sad remnants of a soldier’s life revealed through probate and Ancestry offer a moving glimpse into the afterlife of Civil War service.

We live in polarized times when freedom is threatened but this Juneteenth we should remind ourselves that we have overcome far worse.

The Interstate Highway System created a national polity defined by circulation. To rethink the Interstates is to rethink the United States.

A historian reviews new books by Peter Beinart, Avi Shlaim and Pankaj Mishra on the project that animates Israel’s violence.

Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has also been a place where those liberties end.

Of course, Juneteenth should be recognized as a Black holiday belonging to Black people. But this is not a day purely of joyful celebration.

In their time, “Jaws” and “Nashville” were regarded as Watergate films, and both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act.

This Juneteenth we need to discard the caricatures of King that we so often see and learn from what he actually did and believed.

What looks like an excess of strength may really be a deficit of liberty.

We cannot divorce the independence of the executive branch from its substance.

A new book portrays five American historians who published popular books that sacrificed neither intellectual depth nor political bite.

The nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, depicts a wounded, fearful society, teetering on the brink of disaster. Sound familiar?

Thomas Jefferson's limited government ideal quickly conflicted with the U.S. Constitution and the dominant Federalist Party, prompting a radical proposal.

On the slow path to federal action on emancipation during the Civil War.

Gertrude Berg’s “The Goldbergs” was a bold, beloved portrait of a Jewish family. Then the blacklist obliterated her legacy.

How an Ovid-quoting London broadsheet from the late seventeenth century spawned “Dear Abby,” Dan Savage, and Reddit’s Am I the Asshole.

Jack Hanson on the new pope and his namesake.

The commander-in-chief initially barred black soldiers from joining the ranks, but he came to understand the value—both moral and strategic—of a diverse force.

McKinley led a country defined by tariffs and colonial wars. Trump is drawn to his legacy—and determined to bring the liberal international order to an end.

Even some liberals toasted William F. Buckley Jr. as a patrician gentleman. A long-awaited new biography corrects that record.

Domestic deployments have generally been quite restrained. Can they still be?

Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.

The white historian’s responsibility to radical empathy and refuting the “invented past”.

“When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash.”

Navigating around the harbor through the East Boston Tunnel.