Excerpts

Six decades of civil-rights efforts haven’t budged the racial wealth gap, and the usual prescriptions—including reparations—offer no lasting solutions.

During the American Revolution, some individuals took advantage of the upheaval to advocate for a new colony: New Ireland.

The strange fate of mixed-race families in prisons during World War II.

Colonel Elmer Ellsworth's death marked a turning point in how the nation honored the fallen.

The private boxes for the privileged few in today’s baseball stadiums are nothing new.

On Richard Hofstadter and the current assault on academia.

John Seabrook’s history of Seabrook Farms, where many incarcerated Japanese Americans worked during WWII, is ultimately about fathers and sons.

Thousands of left-wing American Jews have protested Israel. They are taking part in a tradition of anti-Zionist Jewish radicalism.

A new book shows that Marxism in the US "was never constrained to the reiteration of a set of dogmatic principles one associates with party ideologues."

A closer look at the character’s history shows that the latest movie is true to his past.

Jaws is a landmark hit, but also a sharp 1970s film shaped by political ire, social critique, and realist cinema’s lasting influence.

Historian Thomas A. Tweed proposes an environmental approach to the study of American religion.

A new book unearths a chapter of the state’s story when anti-intellectual fundamentalism was put to good ends.

Despite the recent backlash against DEI, there is a longstanding tradition of virtue capitalism in the United States.

Where they come from, how they've evolved, and how they could change.

Pits and seeps full of tar and asphalt offer new insights into old ecosystems and cultures.

On the eccentric, creative minds behind McKim, Meade and White.

People living in British America and later the nascent United States recorded their family histories in needlework samplers, notebooks and newspapers.

Mike Gold, Alexander Bittelman, and the paradoxes of left-wing Zionism.

The harrowing experience of being powerless against illness and death.

Like the atomic bomb testing site, the new bathing suit was named “le bikini,” and its impact was almost as explosive.

The cowboy apocalypse and American gun fandom.

Before that "giant leap for mankind" Americans weren't so enthusiastic.

The men who set off the nuclear age tell the tale in their own words.

Can Zohran Mamdani reshape New York—and national—politics like Mayor Fiorello La Guardia once did?

A sweeping new history explores facial hair as a proving ground for notions about gender, race, and rebellion.

Declassified documents show atomic testing in New Mexico distributed radioactive matter to an extent that the scientists at Los Alamos were ill-prepared for.

Lesbian relationships among government workers were seen as a threat to national security in the 1950s. But what was a lesbian relationship?

How media technologies made themselves at home in one of the most private spaces of modern life.

Chinese immigrants, the queue, and the boundaries of political citizenship.

And why we should find it.

On the outsized role that Christians have played in the oil business.

Trump did not create this situation, but he has accelerated its centrifugal forces.

Both Trump and Cleveland employed the rhetoric of worthiness and efficiency, anti-fraud and anti-corruption, as justifications for their austerity measures.

Thomas Kinkade’s paintings show conservatives a world they have already won.

"The Cycles of American History" foresaw American voter dealignment, and an age of voters prioritizing personality over party—but it didn’t anticipate Trump.

When all the bad things America did are true, but none of the good things, something is amiss.

Robert La Follette saw politics as a never-ending struggle for democracy and fairness and preached perseverance.

The neglected Catholic overtones of an American classic.

The location of Trump's immigrant detention center has a painful history of incarceration, abuse, and private interests.

The disquieting story of an American health-product giant.

A new book recognizes Claire McCardell as a pioneer of American womenswear as we know it.

David Blight's report "Yale and Slavery" considers institutional accountability in the context of a world marked by systemic violence and inequality.

A new book traces how "the wet dream of an ageing militarist has become a fundamental force driving American foreign policy."

Celebrating immigrants on the nation's birthday.

The rollback of LGBTQ rights echoes a deeply consequential chapter of American history: the Lavender Scare.

In working through the Winter case files, I often felt pinpricks of déjà vu: an exact turn of phrase, an absurdly specific expenditure.

Establishing freedom of religion was a hard-fought success of the American Founding. Today we are still fighting.

What J.D. Vance excludes from the history of the Civil War and immigration.

Columbia University as security state.