Excerpts

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.

The marketing of stewardesses’ bodies was long an integral part of airline marketing strategies.

These bonuses are not a reaction to a multi-billion-dollar market that rewards winning – they are the foundation of it.

Earl Swift’s Chesapeake Requiem looks at life on a beautiful, vanishing Virginia island in Chesapeake Bay.

The summer's hit songs offered a glimpse into the changing views of Black America.

A side-by-side look at some of the political protests that have shaped American politics over the past hundred years.

Abolishing slavery wasn’t enough. Someone had to actually free the enslaved people of the American south.

Slavery and the legacy of white supremacy.

Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?

They have shaped America, but how old were they on Independence Day?

Intra-American trafficking magnified slavery’s impact.

Washington changed the world forever when he crossed the Delaware—for the worse.

I found a couple, and some fascinating history, too.

Why is it called YA anyway? And who decided what was YA and what wasn’t?