Excerpts

Torn from his family in Africa, Pedro Tovookan Parris spent the last years of his short life in rural Maine.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

A review of Gary Dorrien's new book, “Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel.”

King's visits to Milwaukee highlighted the extent to which the civil rights struggle was a national one.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 letter written from prison remains one of his most famous works.

Elder Michaux, a popular black evangelist, aided the bureau's campaign to destroy King's reputation.

Fifty years later, the legacies of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy still loom large.

Martin Luther King Jr. on what sparked the violent urban riots of the “long hot summer” of 1967.

Labor unrest harmed Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s. This time the GOP might be the loser.

Scholars don't typically pay that much attention to smells, but odors have historically been quite significant.

100 years ago, an enormous steel tank ruptured, sending a torrent of brown syrup on a deadly path through Boston's North End.

Jill Lepore's widely-praised history of the U.S. relies on the eventual exit of indigenous actors to make way for other dramas.

A timeline of border fortification, from 1945 to the Trump Era.

For more than 70 years, undocumented immigrants have shaped the American economy.

It wasn't always this way.

President Trump's trip to the border Thursday to demand a $5.7 billion wall marks another chapter in the boundary's tortured history.

If “Hamilton” is subversive, the mischievous Reed asks, what is it subverting?

As long as Americans continue to flood into Mexico, the wall will do little to deter crossings.

David Garland makes a powerful argument that will persuade many readers that the death penalty is unwise and unjustified.

Donald Trump says there is “a crisis of the soul” at the border. He is right, though not in the way he thinks.

A compilation of interviews with former U.S. Border Patrol officers who served from the 1930s-1960s.

Lee’s beloved father figure was a talking point during the Kavanaugh hearings and is now coming to Broadway. Is he still a hero?

In uncovering the blackness of Peoples Temple, I began to better understand my community and the need to belong.

In the days of Jim Crow segregation, the "Green Book" that listed locations friendly to black travelers was essential to many.

An interactive map of immigrant populations in the United States.

Interrogating dominant white perspectives in mainstream media outlets, government records, and in the very definition of what constitutes a credible source.

After Sacco and Vanzetti's final appeal was rejected, Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, laid out the many problems with their trials.

How the St. Louis Baby Tooth Study reconciled the ritual of childhood tooth loss with the geopolitics of nuclear annihilation.

Fashionable minimalism replaced plush opulence. That’s a recipe for commotion.

In the years after the Civil War, lecturers like E. L. Allen regaled audiences with heartwarming and dramatic tales of battle.

There isn’t any rule against tobacco spitting on the House floor, but there is one against wearing a hat.

She died of cardiac arrest, but the real killer was decades of US policy in Central America.

On Douglass’s monumental life, the voice of the biographer, memory and tragedy, and why history matters right now.

Though Bayard Rustin, close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., was gay, his legacy is not well known in the queer community.

Americans have erected countless monuments to past wars. But how do we pay tribute to the fallen in a conflict that may never end?

Searching for the roots of an American classic.

Bunk's editor shares some of his favorite pieces from the year.

Now two Guatemalan children have died under Border Patrol custody. But the agency’s role in Latin American oppression has a long history.

The Times, as a “venomous Abolition Journal” could not be trusted to provide the truth for a white, slave-owning southerner.

Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory in what is considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse.

History haunts, but Alabama changes.

Half a century after the tropical craze of the 1960s, the modern age of escapism is taking cues from the past.

A noted architect commends Thomas Edison for his progress in developing the phonograph and predicts great things for its future.

The stall-in threatened to interrupt a certain imaginary of progress, democracy, and freedom with the reality of racial injustice.

Imagining a future that separates women from their biological identity seems so “drastic” as to be unimaginable—in 1962 and today.

The librarians who are setting out to make sure the histories of marginalized communities aren't forgotten.

With “The Apprentice,” the TV producer mythologized Trump as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency.

What do the results of the 2018 midterms portend for the next two years?

Some sects of Christian belief have long held that various forms of technology were signs of an approaching apocalypse.

A new book shows the remarkable contrast between 19th-century women’s views of miscarriage and the loss-focused rhetoric of today.