Excerpts

From early New England to the present day, censors have acted out of fear, not prudishness.

Explore the groundbreaking career of the first Black woman to seek the U.S. presidency.

What was “exceptional” about the American Revolution wasn’t so much the creation of a single republic but the immediate opportunity it provided for action.

In the 19th century, pumpkin pie ignited a culture war.

Neil Postman’s jeremiad against TV seems rather quaint today—and not just because he was shouting into the wind and knew it.

The financial world is a theatrical production, abundantly lubricated by that magical elixir of illusionists: confidence.

How the Chinese community of Tacoma, Washington Territory was violently expelled in 1885, and what happened next.

This tale of two girlhoods, Shirley Temple’s and Lindsay Lohan’s, sheds light on what “woman” means in the world of eroticized youth.

There’s more talk of decolonisation than ever, while true independence for former colonies has faded from view. Why?

The Civil War's vast death toll joined Earth's deep time story, magnifying its meaning as part of God's creative acts across eons.

A set of peculiarly American anxieties has spread across continents.

The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'

On Jean Strouse and the art of biography.

Over the course of decades, social democracy abandoned workers. Then workers abandoned social democracy.

The postwar moment of a distinctive new American novel—Nabokov’s "Lolita"— is also the moment in which William Faulkner finally gained recognition.

How did the U.S. government become involved in “adjudicating Indianness”?

The story of suffragist Matilda Gage, the woman behind the curtain whose life story captivated her son-in-law L. Frank Baum as he wrote his classic novel.

Native American communities were elaborate consensus democracies, many of which had survived for generations because of careful attention to balancing power.

Under pressure from his wealthy family, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander claimed that his new wife, Alice Beatrice Jones, had tricked him into believing she was white.

Trump is often described as unprecedented, but in winning a non-consecutive second term, he has a significant antecedent: Grover Cleveland.

The only president before Trump to win, lose, and win again ended up decimating his own party during his second term.

Following a 1925 investigation, immigrant detention in the Galveston County Jail was declared “a crime against humanity.”

It hasn't happened for 100 years.

Though Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett shared a mission, they took very different approaches. Their rivalry was political, sometimes even personal.

We don't need to find heroes in our past presidents. We need to try to understand that tyranny has always been part of American freedom.

Today’s contentious immigration debate is the construct of one man’s effort to halt overpopulation.

On Robert Moses, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the culture of environmental waste.

The "parental rights" movement, rooted in colonial theocracy, has evolved into a political force resisting racial, gender, and educational equality.

A critique of colonialism from Martian science fiction.

A reading list tracing the history of the birth control movement through novels.

Greenwich Village’s bohemian and queer culture roots lie in its history of incarcerating women, notably via the Women’s Court and House of Detention.

John Steinbeck based “The Grapes of Wrath” on Sanora Babb’s notes. But she was writing her own American epic.

A new film examines Trump's formative years under the tutelage of Roy Cohn.

Norma Gabler's work in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s foreshadowed today's campaigns.

Campus speech debates reveal a history of distorted narratives, balancing free speech, moral standards, and generational conflicts in U.S. universities.

Quinn Slobodian and Jennifer Mittelstadt discuss their research on the meanings of “globalism” and “sovereignty” throughout history.

On Percival Everett’s “James.”

Donald Trump’s victory will inevitably reopen the “fascism debate.” But does a populist whose appeal cuts across diverse groups truly fit the fascist profile?

Historically, liberals defended the First Amendment and our free speech rights. Now, too many on the left seek to undermine constitutional protections.

Testing is necessary. The SAT’s creator is not.

Why “Let’s have public schools like the Founding Fathers had” is such a terrible idea.

Americans love games of chance, but history shows they're a poor substitute for a robust investment in public goods.

The 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.

Cicely Saunders realized that preparing for a good death is the first step in providing one.

In the cultural wasteland of the Reagan era, they showed that a band could have mass appeal without being cheesy, or nostalgic, or playing hair metal.

When Thomas Jefferson penned ‘all men are created equal,’ he did not mean individual equality, says Stanford scholar.

Democrats have often described Latinos as decisive when they support liberal candidates and inconsequential when they don’t.

The labor troubadour Joe Hill was executed by a Utah firing squad for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit.

Leaders of the political right learned lessons from the 1960s that still inform the movement today.

The success of “Reagan” reflects the market demands of a more fragmented moviegoing public—and reality.