Excerpts

Historians are recovering the overlooked history of North America’s Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake.

As plans are laid for a new casino, one can trace, through four figures, a history of rivalry and excess, rife with collisions of character and crime.

On the life, influences, and “sophisticated yet lucid brand of Marxism” of the late, great writer.

The biggest problem with the history Trump wants to impose on us is that it never, in fact, existed.

On freedom, servitude, and writing a novel set in the seventeenth century.

The long and winding tale behind the Resolute Desk.

By posting paintings like “American Progress,” the DHS signals its white supremacist beliefs.

How the New Right emerged from neoliberalism’s inner split.

Eighty years after the bomb, scientists still grapple with nuclear legacy. Some seek atonement, others insist it’s no longer their burden.

Sixty-four years after Radio Free Dixie first aired, the show is still a shining example of a truly revolutionary cultural institution.

A woman killed by Congress.

After Hiroshima, scientists became key political voices, some as stewards, others as activists, shaping nuclear policy and moral responsibility.

With Iran’s theocracy under strain, a new history shows that its rise was mainly a stroke of bad luck.

Previously unknown, a map drawn by Lord Percy, the British commander at Lexington, sheds new light on the perilous retreat to Boston.

How Lakota performers challenged the 'exotic othering' of their identities in the Sarrasani circus.

A new book examines the long history of racial inequality in higher education through the post-baccalaureate experiences of Jim Crow era African Americans.

A lack of regulatory oversight of supplements allows misleading labels and dangerous products to slip through the cracks and into American homes.

Vague phrasing enfranchised women who met specific property requirements. A 1790 law explicitly allowed female suffrage, but this privilege was revoked in 1807.

To restore public trust and prepare for the next pandemic, we need a reckoning with the U.S. experience—what worked, and what didn’t.

People tend to assume they know exactly what the Cold War was and when it ended. Anders Stephanson argues that this standard chronology doesn’t fit the facts.

Conflicts over Israel’s founding encompassed religion, race, and politics.

He misrepresented the history of the gym-class test. I know because I served on the council that helped modernize it.

The United States has forgotten the radical German American immigrant socialists who spilled blood for antislavery and other liberatory causes.

Coaches have long sacralized the gridiron, extolling it alongside faith, family and the military as a setting stone of the social order.

"It is only stereotypes of Indians as primitive that make their power to transform markets surprising."

NASA recently announced a partnership with a couture designer, but in the 1960s, the first spacesuits were made by a company known for bras and girdles.

As a clergyman and physician, his medical practice, his chronic illnesses, and his theology were intertwined throughout his life.

How and why ideas like germ theory are pursued, accepted or ignored, and how human habits of the mind can make it difficult to ask the right questions.

For as long as the United States has had nuclear weapons, officials have struggled with how to transport the destructive technology.

Investigators never reached a conclusion about the death of Pullman porter J. H. Wilkins, but his killing revealed much about the dangers of his profession.

In 1861, Edward Payson Weston walked the 500 miles from Boston to D.C., and launched a legendary career as a pedestrian in the process.

In 1864 San Francisco, Twain found hardship, Bohemia, and his voice—transforming from local reporter to rising literary force.

In 1880s Texas, farmers and factory workers discovered they had the same enemy: corporate capitalists.

On daguerreotypes, William Henry Fox Talbot, and darkroom dangers.

Correspondence about writing, travel, and friendship, from 1926 through 1929.

Self-professed defenders of free speech have become the most fervent advocates and agents of government censorship in the twenty-first century.

On the intersection of environmental contamination and violence in the Pacific Northwest.

The psychiatric hospitals promoted by Thomas Story Kirkbride and Dorothea Dix were quickly overcrowded and underfunded — a failure that haunts us today.

The AJC wielded its editorial power to pave the path for Cop City and the 1906 race massacre, directly harming Black Atlantans.

On the abolitionists, Reconstruction, and winning “freedom” from the Right.

With his strange machines and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created a new technique for improving strength and movement.

Despite seeming like strange dance partners, disco and classical make the best music—together.

The unique brutality of the US capitalist class bred a labor movement that has often limited itself to being a private insurance provider.

In the mid-1800s, shady milk purveyors found it was cheaper to keep cows in cities and feed them the byproducts of whiskey manufacturing. The results were dire.

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.

In Ozzy Osbourne's hands, Satan gave a middle finger to hypocrisy and fearmongering.

George Lunn, socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York rose to power in 1911 by making a difference in people's lives.

The 1893 World’s Fair and the origins of Aunt Jemima.

America’s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media.

Over the past several decades, concerns about costs and producing short-term results have narrowed the NIH’s impact.