Excerpts

With ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,’ Tarantino slakes his thirst for nostalgia while playing with another piece of history.

Creating the city's bucolic, natural landscapes required a good deal of displacement, technological intervention, and erasure.

Yesterday’s “good" immigrant can turn into tomorrow’s radical.

Other than being alive during the 1960s, the baby boomers had almost nothing to do with the era's social and political upheaval.

When the going gets tough, the tough start something better.

The great showman taught us to love hyperbole, fake news, and a good hoax. A century and a half later, the show has escaped the tent.

People have passionate feelings about the oddball punctuation. Here are some things you probably didn't know about it.

Barnum called himself the “Prince of Humbugs,” which left open the possibility that one day there would arise a king.

Maybelle Carter witnessed the dawn of the recording era and helped create country music as one of the genre's biggest acts.

Conditional inclusion for "model minorities" perpetuates enduring forms of racial exclusion.

How a group of 19th-century Quakers cut their economic ties to slavery.

We might say that these books are recording a life with music, and that they are worth listening to.

The historic pigments in the Forbes Collection include the esoteric, the expensive, and the toxic.

U.S. presidential elections didn't drag on so long before the late sixties.

My family is a success story. We’re also evidence of the long odds African Americans face on the path to success.

For Herman Melville, the color white could be horrifyingly bleak.

Ralph H. Cameron staked mining claims around the Grand Canyon, seeking to privatize it. To protect his claims, he ran for Senate.

If they return governance to its 19th century roots, they will also do away with courts' ability to review agency action.

It also inspired my own scholarship on the national anthem.

How immigrants established vibrant communities in the rural South over a quarter-century.

When the counterculture optimism receded, things got ugly.

Shared enemies and ideology matter more than Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric.

The Supreme Court justice may have been heralded by many of his progressive peers, but the legacy he left behind is far more ambiguous.

The assault rifle has enabled racists to act alone.

The first newspapers contained not high-minded journalism, but hundreds of readers’ letters exchanging news with one another.

Fifty years after the Republican Party hit upon a winning formula, President Trump is putting it at risk.

A review of Casey Cep's new book on Harper Lee's never written true crime book, "The Reverend."

In the 1930s, a forgotten federal bureau experimented with ways to make soy and other products more popular in the U.S.

Richmond has a long-forgotten graveyard that is the resting place for hundreds of slaves. Will a new railway be built over it?

Was Davy Crockett a sellout? And does it matter?

Franklin Roosevelt’s National Firearms Act of 1934 was aimed at John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and other murderous gangsters.

Anxieties about Trump’s presidency are the expression of a tradition as venerable as the United States itself.

It lets us avoid harder questions about our culture.

Why it matters what language we use to describe what happened in 1919.

In a taped call with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan described the African delegates to the United Nations in luridly racist terms.

Trump may block entry to foreigners who need public benefits—a proposal rooted in 19th-century laws targeting poor immigrants.

Conservatives created a rosy image of Reagan to further their political project.

President Trump is building on a tactic pioneered by segregationists.

Their great-grandfather had bought the land a hundred years earlier, when he was a generation removed from slavery.

How a black teen’s drifting raft triggered a deadly week of riots 100 years ago in Chicago.

America in the summer of 1919 ran red with blood from racial violence, and yet today, 100 years later, not many people know it even happened.

These collections of everyday objects are clues to strangers’ daily lives.

A 1974 Supreme Court decision found that school segregation was allowable if it wasn’t being done on purpose.

The National Conservatism Conference in Washington had a very 1930s vibe.

Rumors ran wild as white mobs assaulted black residents who in turn fought back, refusing to be intimidated.

And how a handful of black Southerners helped perpetuate it after the Civil War.

Cabinet members slugged it out, but the one with the real war experience convinced Reagan not to avenge the Marine barracks bombing.

And it’s not simply that he calls himself a socialist.

Certain pundits are misrepresenting the biography of the "first black slaveholder."

Let’s get the history of American immigration policy straight.