Excerpts

Proponents believe lethal injection to be a medical marvel, but in reality it’s junk science.

A review of four books that all deal with the long-lasting contradictions between the mythology and reality of farming.

The presidential text that hits your phone Wednesday will be the first, but it's part of a decades-long lineage of government alerts.

Members of the working class were once among the environmental movement's best allies. That support has largely disappeared.

When conductor and soloist clash, a concerto performance can turn into a contest of wills.

In the 19th century, a tariff dispute actually came to blows, with 30 million frozen herring caught in the middle.

Physicist and writer Leo Szilard was vital to the creation of the atomic bomb. He also did everything he could to prevent its use.

The First World War prompted the politicization of nearly all aspects of American life.

During and after slavery, some whites considered legal marriage too sacred an institution to be offered to black Americans.

The ‘First Television War’ was also documented in over 5,000 songs.

A decade after the crash of 2008, a growing movement has thrust our prolonged housing crisis to the center of the national agenda.

The themes of his UN General Assembly speech have deep roots in U.S. history.

Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were both patients of this infamous rest cure.

How voter suppression became a political weapon in American politics.

A film scholar reflects on the image of masculinity depicted in "Grease 2," released the same summer of Kavanaugh's alleged assault.

Using the court system to stymie a president has backfired before.

Real-estate interests have long wielded an outsized influence over national housing policy—to the detriment of African Americans.

Commemorative class books evolved from practical notebooks into collections of hair clippings, two-line rhymes, and summer wishes.

Baldwin's often overlooked final years of activism during the 1980's.

Remember Perot?

Considering the religious roots of the 1960s anti-militarist counterculture.

How do socialist demands become liberal common sense? The history of the New Deal offers a useful lesson.

The lessons from a critical California election in which voters rejected a virulently homophobic ballot measure.

The history of the once-ubiquitous labor schools holds lessons for any future revival of working-class activism.

The decline of America’s rural health system and its toll on my family.

A historian assesses Donald Trump’s claim that the first president faced his own allegations of sexual assault.

The beloved romantic comedy’s date rape scene provides important context for the Brett Kavanaugh accusations.

When it comes to partisan Supreme Court nominations, history repeats itself.

How sexual assault victims in colonial America navigated a legal system that was enormously stacked against them.

Can renowned Southern chef and writer Edna Lewis' radical communist politics be parsed out by analyzing her cookbooks?

Though Donald Trump has made it into a catchphrase, he didn’t come up with the metaphor “drain the swamp.”

While lynching is most closely associated with former Confederate states, hundreds were committed elsewhere in the country.

Sean Carswell looks into James M. Cain and his time reporting on the West Virginia Mine Wars.

Sherilynn A. Ifill on justice (and its absence) in the 1930s.

The world's greatest clockmaker sent a clock to the new world – and everything went haywire.

The concept of adolescence is a recent invention — and it has been applied unevenly to children from different backgrounds.

Feminists saved the 42nd president of the United States in the 1990s. They were on the wrong side of history.

African American women’s voices from slave narratives to #MeToo.

A look at what caused the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

An in-depth history of the most important pop innovation of the last 20 years, from Cher’s “Believe” to Kanye West to Migos.

In early America, one's looks, rather than date of birth, often determined one's age.

Few democracies require children to make a daily declaration of fealty to country.

We’re not equipping children to become good citizens.

Du Bois's "Black Reconstruction in America" showed that the black freedom struggle has always been one for radical democracy.

American evangelicals once saw the Soviet Union and other communist countries as the world’s greatest threat to their faith.

The political scientist argues that the desire of identity groups for recognition is a key threat to liberalism.

In so many ways, George Romero's lo-budget horror film defined the year 1968.

In her groundbreaking new book, Monica Muñoz Martinez uncovers the legacy of a brutal past.

Anxieties about the effects of screens on human health are hardly new, but the way the public addresses the problems has changed.

The elusive meaning of privacy in America.