Excerpts

Sarah Curtis: “Maybe we’ve just learned what my teenage daughter does not yet fully know: that to be held to a law is often to be loved.”

Washington’s ‘warrior ethos’ was grounded in decency, temperance and the capacity to act with courage without surrendering to rage.

A memoir explores L.A.'s political culture after the Rodney King beating.

The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.

Who gets to move freely in California’s auto insurance system?

The retirement of United Mine Workers of America’s longtime president is a reminder that labor and religion have always been entangled in coal country.

Why some on the right want to know if your ancestors were here during the Civil War.

On the terror of being buried alive and Americanism in Poe’s work.

Ubisoft was reportedly working on a game set after the Civil War era, but canceled it due to politics and protagonist backlash.

Karl Marx never visited the United States, but he and his ideas left an imprint nonetheless.

They might be surprised that the republic exists at all.

Unpacking the complexities surrounding Native authenticity.

Sending Redcoats to American cities worked in the short term. But over time, it alienated even the colonists most loyal to the British.

Debt is the almost singular through line behind every major financial crisis.

The US labor movement has never been neutral: its union officialdom has a more-than-century-long history of allying with Zionism.

The second Trump administration has undone the division between political and economic migrants. Did it make sense to separate them to begin with?

Washington Irving’s story isn’t just about a very long nap. It’s about the making of America.

What the Founding Fathers ate—and drank—on July 4, 1777.

Benedict Arnold’s boot wouldn’t come off, and other hardships from my weekend in the Revolutionary War.

How he used America’s past to rescue its future.

How a lost copy of the Declaration of Independence unlocked a historical mystery.

Telling the full story of the town’s past is an easy way to make a lot of people mad.

Violence has marred the American constitutional order since the founding. Is it inevitable?

The Founders were inspired—and threatened—by the independence and self-governance of nations like the Iroquois Confederacy.

Thousands of African Americans fought for the British—then fled the United States to avoid a return to enslavement.

Don't let its universalist language fool you.

In the 1970s, corporate America struck back at the forces attempting to rein it in. One of their tactics was a public service announcement.

As some financial leaders fret publicly about the stock market falling to earth, a new book recounts the greatest crash of them all.

James Madison and John Marshall would say Trump’s tariffs are legal.

She lived for 97 years. Only 24 of them were with Alexander Hamilton.

Digging through dictionary archives to uncover the slowly changing meaning of “redskin.”

Tracing Thomas Sowell’s shift from Marxism to the Chicago school of economics.

In trying to shut the door on race-conscious affirmative action, he may have quietly left another affirmative action door wide open.

Unpacking the sensationalist, and occasionally biased, work of Richard Harding Davis.

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball’s white supremacist great-great-grandfather becomes a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery.

Trump’s tariffs/threats have sparked boycotts and motivated voters north of the border, but Canadians’ desire to distance themselves from the US has deep roots

With sumptuous fabric and big shoulder pads, 'King Giorgio' draped us in an outsized identity.

Island Trees v. Pico tested student rights, free expression and the limits of school boards.

Henry’s fiery oratory turned words into revolution, merging faith, emotion, and democracy to help speak a nation into being.

One of the most influential and ardent Patriots couldn’t persuade his son to join the Revolution.

Trump thinks the US was constrained by “political correctness” in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But those wars were characterized by dehumanization and destruction.

He was denounced by rebel propagandists as a tyrant and remembered by Americans as a reactionary dolt. Who was he really?

The question of what Jefferson meant by “all men” has defined American law and politics for too long.

The leading arguments in support of Black voting rights were race-conscious at their core.

Fareed Zakaria blames America’s crisis on “polarization,” but the real issue is asymmetric radicalization: the Right’s anti-democratic turn.

Blaming video games for violence saves Americans from having to grapple with deeper, harder to solve societal problems.

The Congressional Hackathon highlights fading faith in tech fixes and exposes the limits of AI optimism.

The geological origins of the American Revolution.

What happens when Hitler’s shadow fades—and what moral vision replaces it?

The former President once made an offhand remark about Charles Manson’s guilt. The reaction shows how aberrant Donald Trump’s rhetoric is.