Excerpts

The famed agriculturalist deserves to be known for much more than peanuts.

Why relatives of the musician depicted in "Green Book" called the film “a symphony of lies.”

An 18th-century creole slaveholder invented the idea of 'racial prejudice’ to defend diversity among a slaveowning elite.

Alexa’s interface is treated as revolutionary, but you might be surprised to learn of its predecessors from the mid-1980s.

A new book traces the “citymaking process” of riots and rebellions since the era of Dutch colonization to the present.

As young girls, they fought the fierce battle to integrate America’s schools half a century ago.

A high-school yearbook database dating to the 1900s shows how hairstyles, clothing and smiles have changed.

It’s an exhaustive list. Far longer and deeper than you might suspect.

Journalist Elizabeth Gordon had unsparing opinions about the inadequacy of both mainstream and elite notions of design.

On the erasure of American "territories" from US history.

How the region switched from being the stronghold of one party to the base of its adversary.

The number of detained migrant youth has reached record highs and led to lawsuits over the Trump government’s treatment of minors.

In 1939, 20,000 American Nazis rallied in New York. It was billed as a "Pro-American" rally, but championed Hitler and fascism.

A visual exploration of how a critical piece of social infrastructure came to be.

How the film taps into an ongoing debate about artifact collections acquired during the colonial period.

The Green New Deal’s mastermind is a precocious New Yorker with big ambitions. Sound familiar?

Before California was West, it was North and it was East: an arrival point for both Mexican and Chinese immigrants.

On Collier’s 1950 cover story, “Hiroshima, USA: Can Anything Be Done About It?”

In neoliberalism, state power is needed to enforce market relations, but the site of that power must be hidden from politics.

Migrant futboleros in greater Mexico.

The house in American cinema, from the plantation to Chavez Ravine.

How Hollywood portrays religious prayer.

The Hollywood overhauls that got us from Bogart to Batman.

Bob Dylan's confessional album resisted the political radicalism and activism of 1967.

Anticommunist militant Luis Posada Carriles, who popped up throughout Latin America over the past half-century, won’t be missed.

The U.S. did not always find it necessary to lock up people seeking asylum.

In an extensive search of college yearbooks, we found blackface and Ku Klux Klan photos like Ralph Northam's far beyond Virginia.

Dearborn, proud home of Henry Ford, has addressed the auto pioneer's anti-Semitism in the 1920s, which flourishes today on extremist websites.

“Baron Von Steuben” was responsible for whipping the U.S. military into shape when things were looking bleakest.

How the great influx of people from Africa and the Caribbean since 1965 is challenging what it means to be African-American.

From Davy Crockett to Teddy Roosevelt, this is the legacy of hunting in American culture.

The 1874 locust swarm was estimated to be twice the square mileage of the state of Colorado. Why don't locusts swarm anymore?

A selection of illustrated maps of New York spanning six centuries.

How much do we expect our presidents to rest?

A new book shows that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable as it was for men.

Much of the migrant "crisis" is blowback from decades of official U.S. policy in Central America.

A look at anti-miscegenation laws across the United States.

What remains of Hugh Magnum's work documents how much was shared in common by people who racist laws treated as separate.

The young Civil Rights activist was killed in the dead of night by police and the FBI. Who was Fred Hampton?

The living-history museum in Virginia re-creates 18th-century recipes in its restaurants using ingredients grown in the traditional way onsite. But some modern palates aren't too keen on the taste.

The speeches present the country’s condition as a puzzle that’s missing one piece, which the candidate can supply.

You will never think about the 36th president the same way again.

Do successful presidents make sound knife-wielders?

Hoover was a brilliant manager, a wizard of logistics, and an effective humanitarian. Why do we remember him as a failure?

Reflections on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Get riled up again about Trump's refusal to release his returns with a brief history of this now-discarded presidential tradition.

One of the very reasons the framers wanted the president to take a salary, was to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

This document is the rarest of items in the Library of Congress's manuscript collections: a letter written by an enslaved person.

The study of medicine is rife with racist assumptions and experiments that still shape health outcomes today.

Americans tend to see their country as a nation-state, not an imperial power.