Excerpts

Every law student knows John Brady’s name. But few know the story of the bumbling murder that ended in a landmark legal ruling.

New documents reveal that Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign colluded with a foreign government far more than historians thought.

To depict how waves of immigrants shaped the United States, a team of designers looked to nature as a model.

What is now an object of nostalgia was once a symbol of soulless corporate creep.

Long before “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” holiday songs played a part in the War on Christmas.

Throughout the long and pungent history of humanity, smelling healthy has been as delightful as it has disgusting.

His quest to receive proper compensation illuminates the struggle for artists’ rights.

In 1985, a 16-year-old dropout showed up to school with a shotgun. Everyone said it was just a fluke.

The 45 years of peace between the Cold War superpowers were 45 years of killing for much of the rest of the world.

Remembering Howard Thurman and other forgotten activists.

We can’t fix our immigration policy without understanding its history.

Essays published in a high school paper reflect the boys' efforts to prepare themselves for fighting in the Civil War.

John Adams’s famous defense of the British may not be, as we’ve understood it, an expression of principle and the rule of law.

Much is at stake in understanding the history and relationship between black superheroes and black revolutionaries.

A debate over a planned fence around the site where people of Japanese ancestry, mostly American citizens, were forcibly interned.

Copywriter Robert L. May dreamed up Rudolph during a particularly difficult time in his life.

To alleviate voters' fears during the Civil War, Northern governors refused to open their states to formerly enslaved refugees.

Tillmon and other National Welfare Rights Organization members defied mainstream ideas of feminism in their fight for welfare.

Historians still lack a good way to define, discuss, and address historical actions that appear to be "conspiracies."

Invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been the right's favorite tactic, and Trump’s victory is its greatest triumph.

What happens when the Patent Office doesn't recognize the inventor as a person at all?

Even Winston Churchill needed a doctor's excuse to get out of Prohibition.

How we outsourced foreign aid to private companies.

But maybe those midcentury classics weren't really Christmas songs at all.

How postwar Christmas embraced spaceships, nukes, and cellophane.

The Republican Party used control of women’s bodies as political capital to shift the balance of power their way.

How the world we live in already happened in 1992.

The Confederate flag remains the symbol of our unfinished reckoning with race and violence for good reason.

A collection of photos of American Nazis – and the Americans who took a stand against them.

Growth is only worth something if it makes people feel good.

As historians turn their attention to animals, they are shedding new light on what it means to be human.

The lady smoking caper of 1908.

Over the past decade, music devoted to the cause of amnesty for undocumented immigrants has flourished across the U.S.

Historians used the Twitter thread to add context and accuracy to the news cycle in 2018. Here’s how they did it.

A new biography of the architect shows why it’s hard to ignore the authoritarian characteristics of some of his most celebrated work.

"We are living in an age of historical reckoning," said Southern Baptist leader R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s strange elegy for capitalism.

The untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and personal lives—and what we can do about it.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, talk about “the environment” had little of its later coherence or political meaning.

Four nineteenth-century authors offered blueprints for a better world—but their progressive visions had a dark side.

CNN's firing of Hill fits into a troubling history of repressing black voices on Palestine.

Rapidly rising metropolitan land value can mean "striking gold" for some landowners while threatening the livelihood of others.

History bleeds in Montgomery, Alabama.

For years, Chicago cops tortured false confessions out of hundreds of black men. Years later, the survivors fought for reparations.

Du Bois's ideas about the environment — and how Jim Crow shaped them — have gone relatively unnoticed by environmental historians.

Cynthia Tucker returns to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama – also the hometown of Harper Lee, and the site of 17 lynchings.

The Founding Fathers relied on deceit in championing American independence—and that has lessons for the present.

Sarah Igo’s "The Known Citizen" examines the linked histories of privacy and surveillance in the United States.

For decades, the NFL has used patriotism to advance its interests. Now fans expect it to be something it never was.

For now, yesterday is where the money is.