Excerpts

The roadside battle for people’s attention has been raging for more than a century.

We hold this truth to be self-evident: John Hancock's signature on the Declaration of Independence was too big.

Restoring agency to enslaved people means acknowledging not only that they created marriages, but that they ended them, too.

Goldberg's ridiculous contraptions demonstrated his canny understanding of the limits of invention.

And they were shocked by race relations in the South.

A brief history of the movement that transformed a university and helped catalyze the Americans With Disabilities Act.

From Benjamin Franklin to Quora, how advice has shaped Americans’ behavior and expectations of the world.

Instead of highlighting the glories of capitalism, supermarkets expose the inequalities it creates.

In 1931, Zora Neale Hurston recorded the story of Cudjo Lewis, the last living slave-ship survivor. It languished in a vault... until now.

In 1956, Ed Sullivan showed America what nuclear war looks like. We were never the same again.

James Callender spread scurrilous rumors about Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Then he turned on Thomas Jefferson, too.

A graphic retelling of Robert E. Lee surrender at Appomattox Court House.

In a more accepting world, homosexual men can leave their campy, cruising past, but the price of equality shouldn't be conformity.

No, “liberal” and “progressive” aren’t synonyms. They have completely different histories—and the differences matter.

Shaq, Baron Davis, and Nick Van Exel reflect on The Notorious B.I.G., his murder, and the city they called home.

There was a time when Americans valued 'competency' over riches and saw wealth as the cause of poverty.

On Kay Nielsen, Disney, and the sanitization of the modern fairy tale.

When the audience revolted at Carnegie Hall.

The president deserves the Jackson legacy, but not for the reasons he'd like.

What started the Information Age?

Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.

Research shows that many more Native Americans were lynched than previously believed.

Women have always come to the aid of men in power, but the costs of such actions have not always been immediately apparent.

The long legacy of structural racism in the New Deal-era housing market.

When slaves got close to voting rights, slaveowners changed the rules of the game.

On history, race, and guns in America.

Men no longer have unfettered access to women's bodies. Not everyone is happy about that.

A 1942 glossary documents the origins of terms like "punk," "haywire," and "skidroad."

Pop culture's surreal embrace of the serial killer.

Why business interests have spent 70+ years crusading for right-to-work laws.

This is the man who has criticized the FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King as "shameful."

The conservative media made this president, and the conservative media will keep him in office.

The origin story of an iconic novel.

Black Americans have just one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans, and the difference in home values is a big part of the problem.

The perils of comparing Trump to twentieth-century dictators.

The two versions of WWI taught in most schools tell us as much about the present as they do about the past.

Trump has called Andrew Jackson a "military hero and genius and a beloved president."

Tensions ran high when President Wilson quashed the return of the former president’s Rough Riders

Experts weigh in on how historians of the future may assess President Trump's achievements after his first 100 days in office.

Blacks continue to die younger than people in other groups in the Black Belt.

The lessons of Japanese interment for policy makers today.

Too often, we look to history not to understand it, but to seek out confirmation for our preexisting beliefs. That’s a problem.

The link between immigration and crime exists in the imaginations of Americans, and nowhere else.

U.S. Census classifications through the centuries reflect broad changes in the way Americans understand race and ethnicity.

The Civil Rights movement led the way, soon followed by anti-war protests and activism for women’s issues and gay rights.

A new exhibit looks at the posters sent out by non-profits and the government in response to the spread of AIDS.

Tribal sovereignty is a concept that even some of the protesters may not be familiar with. But it's important.

A new book by Eric Lott frames white appropriation of blackness as containing the possibility of greater racial solidarity.

Sunday school was a major part of nineteenth century reformers’ efforts to improve children’s lives and morals.

How “pickles and ice cream” became the iconic “crazy” snack for pregnant women.