Excerpts

How we got to warnings about fire and fury: the 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean nation of Grenada thousands of miles from North Korea.

How the hit musical allows those who have been left out of the story to claim the narrative of America as their own.

Statues don’t need to venerate military leaders of the Civil War to promulgate false narratives.

Overlooked by historians, Benjamin Lay was one of the nation's first radicals to argue for an end to slavery.

A first of its kind Library of Congress project aims to identify, catalogue, and preserve America’s broadcast history. 

Rather than censuring the legacies of our ancestors, we should work to make our descendants proud.

One alternative to tearing down Confederate monuments: creatively repurposing them.

The National Parks Service, which preserves many Civil War sites, is finally looking for a way to mark the struggles that defined its legacy.

There’s never been a golden age of free speech at American universities.

A Christian story?

Europeans didn’t just displace Native Americans — they enslaved them, on a scale historians are only beginning to fathom.

The roots of rice in South Carolina's Lowcountry are troubling and complicated. Today, we stir the pot.

The Confederate flag’s military tenure continued long after the Civil War ended.

A new digital exhibit confronts the legacy of racial terror.

A project commemorating an often-overlooked civil-rights milestone recently received the Knight Cities Challenge prize.

Red-baiters deserve at least part of the blame for the shortage of affordable, high-quality pre-K.

Capital punishment and the legacy of terror lynching in the American South.

As we face down the threat of climate change, it’s worth considering how fear of nuclear war has spurred humanity into action.

Since Jeannette Rankin was elected in 1916, 352 women have served in the House and 46 in the Senate. About two-thirds entered Congress during or after the 1990s.

In the wake of the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt seized the moment and gave lasting life to the idea of universal human rights.

It crops up in our speech dozens of times every day, although it apparently means little. So how did "OK" conquer the world?

Why New Orleans took down monuments that had been installed by supporters of the "Cult of the Lost Cause."

“Mississippi Goddam” was an angry response to tragedy, in show tune form.

Despite its persistence in popular culture, extraterrestrial life owes more to the imagination than reality.

In the sixties, the U.S. government ran a secret project to look for gold in the oddest places: seawater, meteorites, plants, even deer antlers.

A third-generation mill worker pays homage to the controversial industrialist.

In 1983, the U.S. simulated a nuclear war with Russia—and narrowly avoided starting a real one. We might not be so lucky next time.

Taking down Confederate monuments helps confront the past, not obscure it.

Why 16 year-olds can help us heal our broken political system.

The fight against civil rights brought it back.

Doing so might kill the next big liberal idea.

Like many facets of the American past, mass incarceration looks different if we consider it through the lens of environmental history.

The intended audience for the document could be found in the royal houses of France and Spain.

Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And other problems we need to solve before we can get out of this mess.

The Texan newspaperman who was born into slavery and helped shape the history of civil rights.

Is there still a civil rights movement?

In the 1940s and 50s, a life of business travel represented a sense of freedom for gay men that would have been impossible in earlier decades.

Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” has lost a bit of its protest oomph—in part because of a decades-long denial of its later verses.

This isn’t all history, of course. The Espionage Act is still on the books: Chelsea Manning was charged under it in 2011.

The roots of inequality run a lot deeper than is often acknowledged.

"Removing the flag in South Carolina was one thing, but racism exists in South Carolina as policy and social practice."

An obscure legal loophole is often to blame.

Members of the Revolution look back on Prince's massive, awe-inspiring 'Purple Rain' tour in our exclusive oral history.

John T. Edge's "The Potlikker Papers" looks at multiculturalism, conflict, and civil rights in the American South—all through the history of the region's food.

How feminism and antifeminism created Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Benjamin Breen examines the importance of John White's sketches of the Algonkin people and the art's relation to the Lost Colony.

President Trump is by no means off the mark to call attention to Andrew Jackson as a precursor. The analogy, however, is not necessarily flattering.

They can if they study the tobacco playbook.

As the South Carolina city prepared to break from the Union, its people swung between nostalgia and rebellion.