Excerpts

Republican House Speaker Joe Straus is calling for the removal of a Confederate plaque about the role of slavery in the Civil War.

As the 150th of the Battle of Gettysburg approaches, it's time to question the popular account of a war that tore apart the nation.

What we can learn about the current moment from Congress' efforts to impeach Andrew Johnson.

His wardrobe -- and the millions he spent on it -- tell you everything you need to know about power, 1980s-style.

The South's insistence upon protecting and spreading slavery caused the Civil War.

What President Richard Nixon’s Twitter account might have looked like during Watergate, had social media existed in the 1970s.

Until fairly recently, President Clinton's narrow definition of adultery would have been backed up by the courts.

It took well over a century for the office of the attorney general to accrue power and independence. Trump could blow that all up.

Decades before Watergate, mobsters helped turn hearings into must-see television.

The White House chief of staff set off a firestorm Monday after his comments on the Confederate general.

Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio program did not touch off nationwide hysteria. Why does the legend persist?

How the contest between capitalism and communism shaped world politics—and defines today’s inequalities.

What would it take for people "to know their history"? Pay attention to the silences.

It's not as new as it seems.

He was a well-known figure in early America, but the name of Warner Mifflin has all but faded from the nation's memory.

Donald Trump writes the latest chapter in a long history.

How 1940s films reinvented the ways stories are told onscreen.

The little-known story of one of the best known sing-along songs, and its connection to women's suffrage.

The story of the legendary pitcher and his 1970 drug-fueled no-hitter.

Jim Marshall photographed the spread of the peace sign between 1961 and 1968, with his images now published for the first time by Reel Art Press.

Private Charles F. Johnson of the 9th New York Volunteer Infantry ponders an unusual celestial phenomenon.

The alt-right is appropriating medieval studies and classical scholarship. What can academics do to stop them?

The Stono rebellion of 1739 was the biggest slave rebellion in Britain’s North American colonies, but it is barely commemorated.

On the occasion of Halloween, an exploration of previous generations' fascination with ghosts, spirits, and witches.

Some call it "Russiagate," others "Comeygate." What are we really saying when we apply the Nixonian suffix?

Nixon? Reagan? Jackson? Historical analogies are simplistic, misleading—and absolutely essential.

"Blade Runner: 2049" portrays a world that is both more terrifying and duller than the world of the franchise's original.

Nineteenth-century urbanization unleashed the nation's anarchic spirits.

The early-morning action is the latest in a series of protests demanding the statue’s removal.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy altered the South’s memory of the Civil War.

Although Karl Marx never saw the U.S., he thought long and hard about how it fit into his theory, especially during the Civil War.

The toll of history’s worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And it may have begun in the United States.

The bullshit, the truth… and Trump.

Americans, warned President Teddy Roosevelt's newly appointed opium commissioner in 1908, 'have become the greatest drugs fiends in the world.'

Black resistance to Lost Cause mythology has been a constant of the past 150 years.

He fought to remake the center—not yield to it.

To shave or not to shave? At the start of the twentieth century, a trend away from facial hair reflected dramatic social and economic shifts.

The author of a new biography of James McGill Buchanan explains how this little-known libertarian’s work is influencing modern-day politics.

Feminism has been on the march since the 1970s, but so has the conservative backlash.

We could have had a very different World Series.

After almost 80 years, America is finally rethinking how it screens its favorite movie.

Niebuhr is a theological hero to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

What the political crisis in post-revolutionary America has to teach us about our own time.

The Sackler dynasty’s ruthless marketing of painkillers has generated billions of dollars—and millions of addicts.

How memory plays tricks with history.

Other presidents used their anger for a purpose — Trump just rages blindly.

Ninety years after the duo was executed, there are virtually no physical markers in Boston commemorating them.

Harvey Weinstein and the history of the male cinematic gaze.

The godfather of supply-side economics is largely discredited by his peers, but revered by Trump and the GOP.

Alone in his stand, Weldon Heyburn despised that Robert E. Lee would be memorialized with a statue in the U.S. Capitol