Excerpts

In the early twentieth century, Mary MacLane’s genre-defying books earned the scorn of critics and the adoration of readers across the nation.

At museums across the South, you'll often find a white woman cooking in a big house kitchen. That's a role that was usually done by enslaved Africans.

A new museum exhibit shows that you cannot understand the city’s history without understanding its workers.  

The historical interpretations crafted by the men of the Dunning School might now be largely discredited and discarded. But their legacies remain.

A history of Japanese Internment in America through the art produced from it.

The Vietnam draft lotteries functioned as a randomized experiment—which has allowed social scientists to study its life-changing effects.

How history forgot Felipe and Vivián Espinosa, two of the American West’s most brutal killers—and the complicated story behind their murderous rampage.

On folk hero John Henry.

In 1935, the case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the Senate’s power to jail a recalcitrant aviation industry lawyer.

Even Magic Kingdoms need urban planners.

To work, a theme park needs to collapse the mythic pasts that it depicts with the pasts of our own lives.

In 1953, as a political battle raged over the US’s nuclear future, the physicist lost a classified document on an overnight train from Philadelphia to DC.

Here’s what to know about consent in the 1940s, when the song was written.

A restless history of Washington Heights.

Jenny Turner reviews "Face It" by Debbie Harry.

Getting out from under the "liberal international order."

Three misunderstood aspects of our governmental system, and the truth pulled directly from the Federalist Papers

Climate disaster at Wounded Knee.

The University of North Carolina agreed to pay the Sons of Confederate Veterans $2.5 million—a sum that rivals the endowment of its history department.

Conservatives like to claim that leftists are opponents of free speech. But that’s nonsense.

Why America shouldn’t panic about its latest challenger.

Materials themselves, like shoes reflected and shaped political cultures around the revolutionary Atlantic and World.

White soldiers, escaped slaves, and American Indians all dealt with food scarcity but often reacted to it differently.

Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene?

An excerpt from a new book reveals how Disneyland came to be.

Twenty years ago, demonstrations against the World Trade Organization opened the space for today’s critics of neoliberal capitalism.

The U.S. government orchestrated the roundup of people of Japanese descent in 12 Latin American countries, citing “hemispheric security."

The fees could rise nearly 500 percent for files documenting the arrival of millions of immigrants to the U.S. between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries

For nearly two decades, US leaders have sounded a constant refrain: We're making progress in Afghanistan. They weren't, documents show, and they knew it.

How a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class.

Keeping the faith in a community facing extinction.

In order to understand America, we have to understand the struggles of the black working class.

Decades of militarization in U.S. foreign policy have fueled violence at every level of American society.

Weekly shows on local TV stations helped make the ironic viewing of bad movies into a national pastime.

The American Descendants of Slavery movement combines a left-wing critique of America’s founding with a distinctly right-wing strain of xenophobia.

A new curriculum from the American Indian Museum brings greater depth and understanding to the long-misinterpreted history of indigenous culture.

The founder of cultural anthropology, Franz Boas challenged the reigning notions of race and culture.

Breaking with party unity can be costly. In the 1950's, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine faced backlash after she condemned McCarthy, a fellow Republican.

In 1997, the former Soviet leader needed money, and Pizza Hut needed a spokesman. Greatness ensued.

For Nixon stalwarts on the House Judiciary Committee, defending the President became an inalterable epitaph.

Fifty years ago this week, a squad of Chicago police officers killed Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

Does the most historically minded school of constitutional law push history aside?

The constitutional standard for impeachment is different from what’s at play in a regular criminal trial.

It wasn’t simply a static symbol – the “blade” actually moved.

For nearly 200 years after the founding of New York, the city struggled to establish a clean source of fresh water.

How the United States became the world’s police force.

Eric Foner has helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.

A new three-part PBS documentary explores the failure of Reconstruction and the Redemption of the South.

The first frozen Tofurky meal was a hard sell with retailers and a mad success with the customers who managed to find it.

A conversation with food historian Andrew F. Smith on his new book, "The Turkey: An American Story."