Excerpts

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."

"I look back now and realize I was teaching a lot of misconceptions."

The revolutionaries were fighting against arbitrary power and for checks and balances.

A new book asks how music criticism can reckon with the lives of immoral artists.

Democrats need to face up to their constitutional duty without fear.

“The country cannot prosper if its cities are decaying.”

It's all about an agenda — and it's nothing new.

Collecting seashells is as old as humanity. What we do with them can reveal who we are, where we’re from, and what we believe.

A new Trump administration proposal would undermine the rights of all workers and harm asylum seekers.

Recently declassified documents constitute a gruesome and sadistic catalog of state terrorism.

In 2011, Citigroup published a 300-page 200th anniversary commemoration Celebrating the Past, Defining the Future. Is it a past to celebrate?

How one monument came to be at the center of Minnesota’s imagined white past.

A political neophyte delivered a speech from note cards — and made history.

In the Watergate era, high-level aides prevented Nixon’s abuses of power. Trump’s underlings can do the same.

Since the invention of the automobile, police have used the dangers of America's roads to justify their growing oversight of motorists.

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

Ben Marks on all that came of one interview in 1994.

The University of Virginia was supposed to transform a slave-owning generation, but it failed.

Southern legal codes included parallel language pairing “master and slave” and “husband and wife.”

A hundred years ago, the Palmer Raids imperilled thousands of immigrants. Then a wily official got in the way.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, he dreamed of a pluralist utopia.

Mo Rocca on the struggle to depathologize homosexuality.

What I saw as the editor of “The Art of the Deal,” the book that made the future President millions of dollars and turned him into a national figure.

From colonial times to the nineteenth century, Thanksgiving was very different from the holiday we know now.

Few people know about the movement to kidnap free black Americans and traffic them into slavery. It's time to change that.

In six weeks, 12,000 were dead of influenza.

Moral thinking about debt has fluctuated throughout U.S. history. Today’s calls for cancellation suggest it may be poised for transformation once again.

Popeyes has long cultivated a black customer base — which has positive and negative ramifications.

In favor of wrestling with the most difficult aspects of our history.

The impact of Columbine on today's youths -- and how the media has shifted its coverage of school shootings.

Liesl Schillinger Considers the Impeachment of Donald Trump vs. the Indictment of George III.

The world's last climate crisis demonstrates that surviving is possible if bold economic and social change is embraced.

Declassified government documents show how both sides of the Iron Curtain worked to have the projects canned.

A close look at the consequences of nuclear testing.

The gravest danger to American democracy isn’t an excess of vitriol—it’s the false promise of civility.

I first met him 21 years ago, and now our relationship is the subject of a new movie. He’s never been more revered—or more misunderstood.

His political evolution points to a different locus of power than the one liberals tend to invoke when discussing the era’s history.

An excerpt from ‘We Return Fighting,’ a groundbreaking exploration of African American involvement in World War I.

Working-class radicalism once transcended nativist division — and can do so again.

"American journalism is younger than American baseball."

When Vice President Spiro Agnew gave a speech in 1969 bashing the press, he fired some of the first shots in a culture war that persists to this day.

In Coates's debut novel, he sets out to recover the struggles for emancipation that have been lost to the past.

America’s racialized topography means African-American historical sites are especially vulnerable to climate change.

In the 1850s, abolitionists, including black women, fought for freedom by force.

Forty years after the Greensboro Massacre, a survivor talks about that day, and why organized workers are such a threat to the powerful.

Forty years ago, a gang of Klansmen and Nazis murdered five communists in broad daylight. America has never been the same.