Excerpts

The island’s New Deal history offers an alternative to disaster capitalism.

Because politicians prioritize military might over individual rights.

A window into the day-to-day workings of the movement for the enfranchisement of women.

On the eve of a major redistricting case at the Supreme Court, a look back at what the nation's founders would have thought.

Fears about trade prompted the decision to make Puerto Rico a colony.

Essential tools for critical thinking about the Puerto Rican debt crisis.

Puerto Rico's financial situation could make it the "next Greece."

A brief history of Puerto Rico's status and relationship to the United States.

The long, sad history of accusing women who seek power and influence of ugliness and ill health.

We are again caught between nationalists longing for an imagined past, and activists invoking ideals the nation has not attained.

Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did "more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."

Perhaps the only true generalization to make about Hefner is that he is given too much credit for his role in American history.

Used in military and football slang, the phrase dates back to at least 1960.

The best growth in recent memory came after President Bill Clinton raised taxes in the ’90s.

Protectionism and exploitation at its worst.

A community in Ohio keeps the memory of Johnny Appleseed alive.

How the Supreme Court got it wrong.

How the silent majority became a loud and angry minority.

The right to vote is under the greatest threat since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Racism, segregation and inequality persist in this civil-rights battleground.

The spectre of Dred Scott is haunting St. Louis.

The Making Of Dylann Roof.

The idea of an unfettered right to carry weapons in public originates in the antebellum South, and its culture of violence and honor.

The Founders never intended to create an unregulated individual right to a gun.

"I don't believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved."

In 1919, white Americans visited awful violence on black Americans. So black Americans decided to fight back.

The undefeatable South.

Elbridge Gerry was a powerful voice in the founding of the nation, but today he's best known for the political practice with an amphibious origin.

One nation, under the gun.

Reagan never really believed that Martin Luther King, Jr., deserved a holiday.

An epic natural disaster restored the forest of an earlier America.

How a post-Civil War massacre impacted racial justice in America.

During Reconstruction, elites used racist appeals to silence calls for redistribution and worker empowerment.

Even in a fractious era, the filmmaker still believes that his documentaries can bring every viewer in.

There was little indication 166 years ago that the book would enter the canon of great American fiction.

The civil rights movement was not nearly as admired by white Americans in its own time as we imagine it being.

The anti-fascist left stems from a long tradition of violence and protest in America.

In an economy based on doing business with strangers, monitoring people's trustworthiness quickly became very profitable.

How it came to be that Puerto Rico came to have a separate but unequal status under American law.

We date the expansion of voting rights to women in 1920, but the real story is a lot more complex.

The belief endures, from Armstrong’s time that visible, affluent African-American entertainers are obliged to adopt a pose of ceaseless gratitude.

What we can learn from the FBI’s latest round of crime statistics.

Like most relationships, it’s complicated.

Underlying current debates, says Jill Lepore, are fundamental conflicts over the meanings of the past.

The new series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is mesmerizing. But it doesn’t answer key questions about the Vietnam War.

Watching Ken Burns' latest epic with a historian who has written extensively about the war.

The story of one veteran who could never find peace—until he made Vietnam his home.

What should be done with civic monuments to the Confederacy and its leaders?

Independence Day has always been a political battlefield.

From log cabins to Gilded Age mansions, how you lived determined where you belonged.