Excerpts

We say we’re a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war?

The Shah’s reign witnessed years of oppression against the Iranian people, and Carter’s toast added fuel to the fire.

As President Trump’s rhetoric against Iran heats up, it's worth recalling a time when the two countries had a different relationship.

Archival records make clear that the U.S. government was the key actor in the 1953 coup that ousted Mohammad Mosaddeq—not the Iranian clergy.

The long aftermath of a North Carolina man’s decision to deed a plot of land to his former slaves.

The Founding Father’s account of the Constitutional Convention includes a famous conversation about causes for impeachment.

It’s 2020 — do you know where your content is?

The next 9/11 never came. Instead, we got Sandy Hook, and Las Vegas, and Parkland…

In his new book, Daniel Rodgers not only offers a close reading of Puritan history but also seeks to rescue their early critique of market economy.

This year, Merriam-Webster added a new definition to the word “they”: “used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.”

Wherever there has been power, there has been a struggle for narrative control.

A new DNA study of skeletons from a farmstead on the Delaware frontier has revealed key information about the early transatlantic slave trade.

A dispute between some scholars and the authors of NYT Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of U.S. society.

African slaves had been in Florida 54 years before they arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. One historian says the 1619 narrative 'robs black history.'

Over 1000 historians have signed this statement condemning President Trump's actions.

Nostalgia has always been harnessed or packaged to sell things.

How Charles Dickens' unpleasant trip to Boston led to "A Christmas Carol."

The modern image of Santa Claus first appeared in a Civil War illustration, and it wasn’t the last time St. Nick was deployed in wartime.

This is about much more than Star Wars—it is about media bias and "information disorder" in the twenty-first century.

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.