Excerpts

The brutal caning of Sen. Charles Sumner in 1856 shows the difference between courage and concession.

On the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, racism, and federal power.

High-minded and scandal-prone, a foe of marriage who dreamed of domesticity, Fuller radiated a charisma that helped ignite the fight for women’s rights.

Ambitious office seekers during the nineteenth century experienced wild swings of fortune that depended on the public’s mood and party benevolence.

Trump’s war against elite academia has created an uncanny parallel to the most dramatic fight in Jackson’s day—the attack on the 2nd Bank of the United States.

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.

On the other side of the hardened activist was a man who stirred his coffee with his daughter's finger and told her it made it sweet.

A new documentary revisits a pivotal week at Gallaudet University in 1988.

The Great Society’s Model Cities Program wasn’t perfect. But it offered a vision of what democratic, community-based planning could look like.

How the “forever business” is changing at New York City’s biggest graveyard.

The establishment of a federal agency devoted to space, physics, and more belied a cross-party consensus that such disciplines were vital to national interest.

Whitman curated his image through photography, blending truth and artifice, but like today’s selfies, found more confusion than clarity.

The aviator’s publicity-mad husband, George Palmer Putnam, kept pushing her to risk her life for the sake of fame.

Historians depict late 19th-century American business elites as agents of progress, but many of them could also be called “terrorists.”

The Fugitive Slave Act erased the most basic of constitutional rights for enslaved people and incentivized US Commissioners to support kidnappers.

A conversation with the creators of a podcast series on the feedback loop of American empire.

The political vision that William F. Buckley helped forge was—and remains today—focused less on adhering to principles and more on ferreting out enemies.

Christy Thornton and Greg Grandin discuss his new book, “America, América,” and the intertwined histories of the U.S. and Latin America.

Considering a novel as a whole, rather than as the sum of its parts, was an approach favored by mid-20th-century literary critics. It was also useful for fighting book bans.

Teddy Dreiser tries to make it.

Orisanmi Burton’s "Tip of the Spear" uncovers the obscured and radical demands of the inmates who staged the 1971 prison uprising—a world without prisons.

At the Met, "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style" shows how clothing became a way for Black men to assert presence and push back against control.

How the Minute Man statue may be used to perpetuate the idea of patriotism in times of conflict.

Unreleased tracks show an alternate Dylan: not the folky bard of the standard biographies, but the hippest young blues singer in Greenwich Village.

Architects have made a Fort Worth neighborhood’s history part of the plan.

Dan Nadel on the formative awkward adolescence of an iconic American cartoonist.

Thanks to decades of misguided policy choices, the U.S. has an astonishing lack of maritime capacity.

To defend the Trump Administration, the Court ignored long-standing precedent barring Presidents from firing independent-agency heads at will.

After the successful purges of leftists from unions, US labor leaders were enlisted by government officials to join in their global imperialist operations.

The increasing secularism of the nineteenth century helped make board games a commercial and ideological success in the United States.

A century ago, the Court recognized the essential right of parents to direct the education of their children.

Do we as Americans have the strength to confront our complicated past?

Hayek suspected that nothing about the vindication of neoliberalism was likely to be straightforward.

Tamara Lanier, who sued the school over daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors held in its museum, called the outcome “a turning point in American history.”

“Never again” and the “responsibility to protect” now license forcible territorial annexation.

Before Leo XIV, the weird, century-long history of Americans claiming to be pope.

Birthright citizenship under attack.

A brief look at the usage of "witch hunt" in American politics through the centuries.

In his short story “The Benefit of the Doubt,” Jack London turned truth into fiction, and then some.

The volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States have been written since Abraham Lincoln’s time.

Were you to vanish Marx from every library, you’d destroy the central interlocutor around which most of capitalism is built.

A warning for us all about history repeating itself.

Ryan White changed perceptions of the disease in the United States.

The 1970s campaign fought to get women paid for their work in the home—and envisioned a society built to better support motherhood.

How a sharp-elbowed Polish academic with an unpronounceable name helped defeat the Soviet Union.

Trump is reviving a controversial budget tactic, putting a Nixon-era fight over presidential power and congressional authority back in the headlines.

A new Criterion series of McCarthy-era noir films is a timely collection for an era of rising government repression.

In 1929, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) railed against the growing trend of recorded music in movie theaters instead of live musicians.

Ella Fitzgerald performed above the emotional fray.

The resurgence of “peace and love” aesthetics in menswear today owes itself to the rebellious spirit of the 1960s and 70s, embodied by musician Jimi Hendrix.