Excerpts

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.

A historian looks back at the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in her home state.

The nativist activist helped make anti-immigrant politics mainstream.

Poppy Northcutt planned the vital flight trajectories that got astronauts home from their missions to the moon.

A history of how Peoria became a stand-in for the country surrounding it.

For a century, we’ve loved our cars. They haven’t loved us back.

Employers pay tipped workers $2.13 an hour. Why? Reconstruction-era racial discrimination.

And why comparisons to concentration camps failed to shut them down.

To understand America, you can start with Apollo 11 and all that is counterfactual that’s grown around it.

Why America's obsession with Ted Bundy needs to stop.

The battle for the integration of Major League Baseball started long before Jackie Robinson.

Like other northern liberals in the 1970s, Biden worked to restrict federal civil rights enforcement to the Jim Crow South.

How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America, and what is the ecological cost?

In criminalizing the provision of humanitarian assistance to migrants, we have resurrected the unjust laws of antebellum America.

Immigration activists helped give power to asylum protections once before. They can do it again.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s decision to speak out against Holocaust analogies is a moral threat.

The term “miscegenation” was coined in an 1864 pamphlet by an anonymous author. It turned out to be an anti-abolition hoax.

The Red Summer represented one of the darkest and bloodiest moments in American history.

Standard Oil was not about to be left earthbound.