Excerpts

A genetic mutation in some New Mexico communities can be traced to a common ancestor who came to the area more than 400 years ago.

The story of the artist behind Exxon's famous logo.

A conversation with the creator of a virtual reality experience that takes you inside the protests leading up to MLK Jr.’s death.

Country music is assumed to be the soundtrack of the Republican Party. But it wasn't always that way.

During the Civil War, slave pens held captive Confederate soldiers. After, they became rallying points for a newly empowered community.

Partisanship is much more polarized by racial attitudes than it was 20 years ago.

African Americans are better off in many ways, but are still disadvantaged by racial inequality.

From highways carved through thriving ‘ghettoes’ to walls segregating areas by race, city development has a divisive history.

Recognizing that Americans are not the future of his religion, the late preacher embraced a global world.

The costs of achieving the centuries-old lexicographical dream of capturing the entire English language.

The United States wasn't filled with isolationists, and it wasn't exactly neutral before 1917.

The battle against the remnants of Confederate sentiment is a battle against both white supremacy and class rule.

“No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth: What shall be done with slaves?”

The visualizations condense an enormous amount of data into a set of aesthetically daring and easily digestible visualisations.

Banning them would gut the concept of an armed citizenry as a final, emergency bulwark against tyranny.

The ban's critics say it failed to prevent gun violence, but they're misinterpreting the law's intent.

A historian probes the ‘tragedy’ of the famed scholar's failed WWI history.

What the government's successful clampdown on Quaaludes can teach us about gun control.

An enigmatic 1898 work about the progress of man.

Courageous Americans have been undermined by conspiracy theories for more than 150 years.

The hidden hypocrisy within American outrage over Russian election meddling.

The NRA misquotes George Mason to support its own view of "well-regulated militia."

Pioneers and early archeologists preferred to credit distant civilizations, not Native Americans, with building these cities.

Understanding the immense reach and cultural implications of Latin American music.

Remembering the "Silent Protest Parade."

A review of "Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity," by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

What if we use the history of slavery as a standpoint from which to rethink our notion of justice today?

Once John E. Washington started to dig, he found an incredible wealth of untapped knowledge about the 16th president.

For decades, we’ve been replaying the same absurd partisan debate over whether to take high school activism seriously.

White supremacists have long used fear of losing essential rights in their arguments.

On who has had access to guns in the U.S., and what those guns have meant to the people who have owned them.

What gun regulations meant to the founders, and why the Black Panthers are the true pioneers of today's pro-gun movement.

How did a firearm safety and training organization turn into one of America's largest and most influential lobbying groups?

The history of Black Socialism in America.

Richard Nixon, Billy Graham, and their White House church services.

Separate hospitals for black and white patients were the norm in America, but then all of that changed — and it changed quickly.

He became known as an apolitical preacher. But Graham started out as an ardent conservative.

The Second Amendment does not stand in the way of better gun laws; the NRA does.

New York City’s first planning commissioner lost a bigger battle against Robert Moses than the fight Jane Jacobs won.

Thinking beyond the dichotomies of oppressor and victim reveals the human urges that inspire so much of our expressive culture.

Lily Geismer reviews the second edition of Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind.”

An excerpt from "The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido."

An interview with a historian of Hamilton. That is, an “interview” in the modern sense of questions and answers and not in the Hamilton-Burr sense of pistols at dawn.

Tesla created inventions that continue to alter our daily lives, but he died nearly penniless.

Retracing the 1947 journey that John Steinbeck and Robert Capa took to introduce America to Soviet life.

At the height of the Black Power movement, the Bureau focused on the unlikeliest of public enemies: black independent booksellers.

Christopher Priest broke Marvel's color barrier and reinvented a classic character. Why was he nearly written out of comics history?

Racial tensions are rising, the earth is warming, and evangelicals are doing little to help. That may be Graham’s most significant legacy.

How Nina Simone turned the movement into music.

An 18th-century novel explores how American society handles capitalism's collateral damage — and who deserves a second chance.