Excerpts

300 men and 3,000 miles of bad road.

For white southerners, honor had little to do with justice.

A melody can carry an undeniable purpose even before it gets paired with a lyric.

Requiring displays of patriotism have often been tied to nativism and bigotry.

What the origins of tuna salad, the club sandwich, PB & J, Chow Mein sandwich, and the Scotch Woodcock reveal about our shared history.

There's a long history of states challenging the federal government, and ignoring Native American claims to the land at issue.

The 504 Sit-In was the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in United States history.

Every year, a group in New Orleans gets together to celebrate the birthday of Lee Harvey Oswald, who they believe was framed.

“It is one thing to play dress-up, to imitate pronunciations and understanding; it is another thing to think or dream or live in a language not your own.”

Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson are not the only similarities between the two administrations.

That the 500th anniversary of Luther’s act has been noted without éclat may be something to celebrate.

It ended in disaster.

Journalists' role in uncovering the scandal may not have been as significant as we think.

The racist roots of the opioid crisis.

I didn't know the Confederate general owned slaves. I didn't even know he was part of the Confederacy.

Why the slope from toppling Confederate monuments to shunning the Founders is so slippery.

There can be no "compromise" with the false view of America's past from Trumpists and pop historians alike.

A selection of primary sources compiled by the American Historical Association.

Looking for traces of sexual fantasy in soldiers' letters home.

When three Padres pitchers joined the John Birch Society in 1984, the sports world was challenged by a different kind of political activism.

He’s been called “the art world’s Rachel Dolezal.”

A Cold War-era cartoon celebrates the wonders of oil and free-market capitalism, and the overthrow of the Stalin-like leader of Mars.

Piecing back together the forgotten history of Herman Melville's second son.

Ron Chernow’s biography reminds our 21st-century selves of the distinction between character and personality.

“We are starved!” cried the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown as provisions arrived in 1610.

A detailed look at when and where the U.S. Army was able to enforce the new rule of law in the years following the Civil War.

Is there a special value in archives that are not digitized?

Yes, honorable men can fight for dishonorable causes.

The new Slate Academy finds the seeds of our present politics in the period after the Civil War.

The memorials to the two parishioners will be relocated to a new place of “respectful prominence.”

Mueller and his team are facing a president who seems willing to take down the entire democratic apparatus to save his own skin.

Don’t let extremists on both sides destroy honor and valor, even as they seek to destroy everything else.

The internecine conflict and the institution of slavery could not and did not end neatly at Appomattox or on Galveston Island.

It has less to do with the state's role in the Civil War, and more to do with backlash to the Civil Rights movement.

One thing united the warring factions of the civil war: the doctrine of white supremacy and violence against Indians.

For decades, slaveholders were powerfully committed to the Union. That changed when Washington stopped protecting their interests.

A new book argues that Darwin failed to capture the American imagination because of the untimely death of Henry David Thoreau.

The Irish were slaves too; slaves had it better than factory workvers; black people fought for the Confederacy; and so on.

The susceptibility of black ex-soldiers to extrajudicial murder and assault has long been recognized by historians.

The city council decides to remove four memorials that offered a distorted picture of the city’s past.

As the hunger for more farmland stretched west, so too did the demand for enslaved labor.

A 1928 essay by W.E.B. DuBois on the legacy of Robert E. Lee.

The state's only Confederate memorial, a stone on Georges Island, has been boarded up since June while the state ponders its fate.

What is to be done with a landscape whose features carry the legacy of violence?

Why eliminate street names that tell one part of Southern history when we can amplify them to tell even more of it?

The Confederate general has long been seen, in the South and beyond, as embodying the virtues of the ideal man.

Brandon Byrd examines resistance to the American Colonization Society's attempts to remove free blacks from the US.

The emancipation of black Americans has been written out of our celebration of the Civil War's end.

As a young woman, civil rights pioneer Pauli Murray discovered that the flag could be used as a symbol of defiance.

If Jackson's presidency had been later, he may have prevented the Civil War.