Excerpts

Monsters have always patrolled the margins of the map. By their very strangeness, they determined the boundaries of the regular world.

Tomboys and the endless privileges accorded to white girls.

In 1952, the newspaper publisher and activist joined a long-shot bid by the Progressive Party, paving the way for politicians like Harris.

Will coronavirus prompt the house of cards of college athletics to come tumbling down?

Examining the life of Father Divine, the black preacher who called for the destruction of racial separation and claimed to be God.

There is, and always has been, a vanishingly thin line between charismatic democratic rulers and charismatic authoritarians.

For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices.

Why Americans rejected educating only the children of the wealthy.

A century after the passage of the 19th Amendment, women with felony convictions remain disenfranchised.

An interview with historian Charles B. Dew.

Americans should not honor a revolt to uphold slavery with monuments or florid displays.

McCarthy never sent a single “subversive” to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures.

Republicans are replacing the public good with a far narrower definition of it.

Chicago has been a skunk haven for centuries.

The South’s mythology glamorized a noble defeat. Trump backers may do the same.

The initial movement to build memorials to the Confederacy and its supposed “lost cause” were the original cancel culture.

The policy roots of today’s childcare crisis.

Truman’s radio address on August 9, 1945 frames Hiroshima as a “military base” to justify its bombing.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Remembering "Hiroshima," the story that changed everything.

How many people really died because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings? It’s complicated. There are at least two credible answers.

Why was a second bomb used against Japan, so soon after Hiroshima? A review of several theories.

Comedy from Mad Magazine to The Simpsons.

Whether it’s happening or not.

Beneath the popular folk song, “Swannanoa Tunnel” and the railroad tracks that run through Western North Carolina is a story of blood, greed, and obfuscation.

In “Radical Hamilton,” Christian Parenti argues that the left should use Alexander Hamilton’s mythologized status to drive home his full agenda.

Government investment into a cancer vaccine had drawbacks.

Most recent scholarship, while supporting the view that the policy was vicious, has not addressed the question of genocide.

In fact, Black activists and civil rights leaders have been advocating for compensation for the trauma and cost of slavery for centuries.

Fleeing the Haitian revolution, whites and free blacks were viewed with suspicion by American slaveholders, including Thomas Jefferson.

The denigration of kitsch betrays a latent anti-Catholicism, one born from centuries of class and ethnic divisions.

The unusual union of a renowned artist and the discoverer of the Polio vaccine.

The movement for racial equality echoes the vision of the “August First Day” holiday.

Rick Perlstein’s epic series shows political history and cultural history cannot be disentangled.

It would be a grave mistake to ignore the link between Wilson’s white supremacy at home and his racist militarism abroad.

How dogs permeated slave societies and bolstered European ambitions for colonial expansion and social domination.

The U.S. just can't seem to let go of its naval base on Cuba.

On Paul Ortiz’s “African American and Latinx History of the United States.”

A rebellion against French colonial rule in 1791 led to a new kind of society.

For a long time, European historians paid little attention to the extraordinary series of events that now goes by the name of the Haitian Revolution.

How an African instrument got a racist reinvention.

The authoritarian tactics we’ve exported around the world in the name of national security are now being deployed in Portland.

Who counts determines whose interests are represented in government.

The controversy over buildings, statues, and awards honoring racists has finally reached the baseball establishment.

The 'Gone With the Wind' film legend, who died at age 104, went up against a broken Hollywood studio system—and helped change the industry forever.

How "The Bookman" invented the best seller.

Why the Gilded Age was the era of statues.

Washington supported a much more limited conception of executive privilege.

Environmental historian Donald E. Worster pushes back against recent characterizations of Muir as a racist.

The Supreme Court has betrayed the promise of equal citizenship by allowing police to arrest and kill Americans at will.