Excerpts

Modern policing is linked to overseas colonial projects of conquest, occupation, and rule. Demilitarization requires uprooting that worldview.

The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., has become a flashpoint in today’s reckoning with racist statues.

Revisiting John Hersey's groundbreaking "Hiroshima."

A series of graphs that help explain why at least 830 monuments were erected many decades after the end of the Civil War.

The role of almanacs in nineteenth-century popular medicine.

In times that feel “unprecedented,” it is all the more important to use history as a way to understand the present and chart a path to the future.

During the Civil War, Union soldiers in the West weren’t fighting to end slavery, but to annihilate and remove Native Americans.

As innovations go, the Good Humor vehicle is as sweet as it gets.

Despite our long history of interrogating the memorial landscape, no movement has been able to dislodge it.

Locked-down parents will need an army of tween child-minders. Let "The Baby-Sitters Club" show them the way.

Is being "political" the central force in our identities?

Ideologues of left and right have learned to stop worrying and love rhetorical violence.

What were the religious beliefs of the American founding generation? What do they mean for us today?

There is a conversation about race that white families are just not having. This is mine. 

Social Darwinism from AIDS to Covid-19.

“I ask: what’s been left out of the historical record of my South and my nation? What is the danger in not knowing?”

A new book systematically defends the American Founding against those who believe it was destined to end in nihilism.

Hamilton is an impossibly slippery text. The arguments over the show are part of what make it great.

Studying Hurricane Katrina as a discrete event is studying a fiction.

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.

The parallels between the summer of '32 and what is happening now are striking.

An excerpt from a new graphic biography of Jack Kirby, the "King of Comics."

Police reform is a time-honored counter-insurgency measure to quell rebellion.

A whole vision of history seems to be leaving the stage.

We all know, in the abstract, that Wilson was a white supremacist. But here’s how he wielded his racism against one accomplished Black American.

How a monument that championed black sacrifice in the name of emancipation was forgotten.

The tribal sovereignty movement from the late 1960s never really ended. To find the future of the Native left, look to the past.

Revisiting the contradictions in "Hamilton" – and in the pushback to criticisms of the beloved musical.

Has the celebrated musical eclipsed the man himself?

What seemed to enrage a former inmate most was the mutual consent of the men he lived with.

Why the “racial wealth gap” fails to explain economic inequality in black and white America.

Where does Edith Wharton's idea of innocence fall into our own world?

"Moonshine" is now a big thing in the liquor biz. But it takes a visit to West Virginia to get a sense of the complex stories in every barrel.

Like the museum behind it, the monument was designed in large part to train white people in a fundamentally racist way of seeing.

The National Statuary Collection announced the unification of the former slave economy’s emotional heartland with the heart of national government.

How the history of dispensationalism shapes U.S. foreign policy today.

Last week, the mayor announced that the city’s most prominent statue of Christopher Columbus would be removed “as soon as possible.”

Sometimes I learned more Black history in a week at home than I did in a lifetime of Februarys at school.

An 1813 correspondence demonstrates that medical expertise in early America was not limited to men or physicians.

Places of memory up and down the East Coast also witnessed acts of resistance and oppression.

The ideology of the men who celebrated the United States while fighting for its dissolution is still very much alive.

How African-Americans in Early America celebrated the Declaration of Independence's ideals, even as basic freedoms were denied to them.

For decades they covered up the U.S. massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere. This is why we never learn our lessons.

Tracing the history of the Grateful Dead folktale and the evolving obligations of being alive.

Generations of Asian Americans have struggled to prove an Americanness that should not need to be proven.

How calls for “real reforms” have resulted in measures that further shield police from real accountability.

A new book explores the history of the people who have been written out of the L.A. suburb's longtime origin story.

The author reflects on his own journey with Dylan, and shares some of his favorite pieces of Dylanology.

Myrlie Evers began to weep when she heard the Mississippi Legislature vote to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag.

Masks have a history associated with disease, status, gender norms, and more.