Excerpts

To hold the police accountable for misconduct, data related to police violence must not only become more accessible, it must also become more reliable.

A new book persuasively argues that the Federalists’ attempt to squash opposition and the free flow of ideas was even more nefarious than we thought.

After Governor Northam announced its removal, two Richmond historians reflect on the legacy of the Lee Monument.

In 1932, the “Bonus Army” of jobless veterans staged a protest in Washington, DC. The government dispersed them with tear gas.

Keep in mind what it meant to the people who created it.

Education campaigns for HIV/AIDS hold lessons for COVID-19.

Rap group N.W.A. understood vulgarity and controversy were necessary to draw attention to police brutality.

Trump’s family separation policy belongs to a much longer history of U.S. government forces taking children from families that don't match the American ideal.

For Baldwin, the past had always been bent in service of a lie. Could a true story be told?

The actual Confederate States of America was a repressive state devoted to white supremacy.

How allies abroad help the fight against racism at home.

The role of "big government" in American history.

Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions.

An investigation found that USDA promoted misleading historical data which ultimately cost black farmers land, money, and agency.

A celebration of emancipation in Texas is taking hold in the minds of Americans everywhere.

How a Texan holiday became a national tradition.

As white, southern troops raised the battle flag, they showed that they were fighting for change abroad—but the status quo at home.

Faces on coins tell stories —as do words, especially in mottoes.

Watching fake news spread in 1942.

One of the most powerful phrases in the Civil Rights Act is often viewed as a malicious joke that backfired. But its entrance into law was far more savvy.

How a passionate thirty-one-year-old systems analyst and a militant World War II veteran pushed the military to bend toward justice.

Artists like Yola and Rhiannon Giddens are blowing up what Giddens calls a “manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.”

On the roots of the community-based model that reemerged in the COVID era to counter the absence of adequate state support.

What explains the apparently sudden spike in intergalactic traffic after WWII? If Cold War anxieties are to blame, why have sightings persisted?

The reparations debate highlights what Juneteenth is about: freedom and demanding accountability for past and present wrongs.

What would it mean to define the Civil War as a necessary and crucial final step in the long, even more tragic history of slavery in America?

A combination of historical surpluses—the afterlives of slavery, of the deranged presidency—has raised the stakes in the present struggle.

She's been having a moment — and that's not a good thing. Using baby name data, we found other names that are equally as “Karen” as Karen.

Contrary to the image of the kneeling slave, Black abolitionists did not wait passively for the "Day of Jubilee." They led the charge.

Protest slogans and the terms for debate.

The present round of protest is different. The participants are people of every race, ethnicity, sex, age, and religion.

Lessons from Frederick Douglass on the tortured relationship between protest and change.

Protesters are tearing down statues of Columbus and other villains of history. The true test will come when they reckon with their heroes.

He was the most revered poet of his day. It’s worth trying to figure out why.

The dangerous myth that blacks in bondage chose not to be free in revolutionary America.

Before feminists rebranded them as sex toys, vibrators were just another medical device.

The pursuit of justice has been defined by a rote binary of punished in a cage versus unpunished and free.

Real-estate developers used the statues to draw white buyers to a neighborhood where houses couldn't be sold “to any person of African descent.”

Limits on when police can use force is a better solution than banning police unions.

Eighteen years of photographs at a Virginia dragstrip show a multiracial community united by their love of fast cars.

A graphic essay about the brutal toll taken by the epidemic on indigenous communities in Alaska.

There are superficial similarities, but what we’re seeing now is something completely new.

The NAACP investigates a race riot.

The agency's earliest ad campaigns emphasized youthful idealism, patriotism and travel opportunities.

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings, we're going to see a lot of journalistic takes on them — many of them totally wrong.

Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time.

A proposal to follow the model several former Soviet States have pioneered, to deal with our own monuments to the Confederacy.

American photojournalism has always been entangled with race and religion.

"I think we have to increase our shame — and I don't think shame is a bad thing."

Many are looking to history for clues about how to understand the evolving moment. Here's what to know.