Excerpts

“The major issue of the American Revolution was the true constitution of the British Empire.”

Mexico’s 1910 Revolution showed that democracy endures only when economic justice is upheld through workers’ and peasants’ rights.

A new biography of the journalist Walter Lippmann bashes conservatives but adds value.

Remembering Katrina to face today's storms.

On the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of ‘The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.’

Southern businessmen and thinkers were inspired by ancient Egypt: To them, it served as proof that all great civilizations were sustained by enslaved labor.

Are we really living through a uniquely lonely moment? When it comes to friendship, this isn’t the first time that authorities have cried wolf.

The quirky characters and social dynamics of Mark Twain’s time in Elmira, New York.

Gurney Norman and the dream of the counterculture.

How did the Mason–Dixon Line—meant to resolve a longstanding colonial border dispute—come to represent the US’s foundational divide between slavery and freedom?

Reports on the May 1960 downing of an American U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union offer a case study in Cold War posturing and misdirection.

How American history has valorized a draw.

Chronicling the experience of a teenage soldier during the Revolutionary War.

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton may be titans of the American Founding, but these two poles don't describe everything.

Between 1790 and 1860, New York City’s food markets were public, sustained by active government involvement. What happened?

Documents reveal the Ford administration's Efforts to block revelations of CIA covert operations in Chile.

From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is trying to create a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity.

David Lilienthal’s account of running the TVA can read like the "Abundance" of 1944. We have a lot to learn from what the book says — and what it leaves out.

Since her untimely death in 1963, the legendary country music star continues to inspire new audiences and artists.

A new book says polarization breeds impunity from scandal. But America’s worst injustices emerged when the parties got along too well.

The attack on Venezuela and abduction of Maduro surprised everyone, except oil companies. It's not the first time the U.S. was motivated by corporate interests.

A historical reconstruction of the Big Apple’s crime decline, told from inside the institutions responsible for public safety.

In "Make Your Own Job," Erik Baker shows just how long Americans have scrambled to pile work on top of work—and at what cost.

A new book recounts diverse opinions among US foreign policy intellectuals during the Korean War.

Exploring the intersection of family history with the rise of the religious right.

A culture clash driven by finances and Old World alignments had the Big Apple contemplating leaving the Union. The Civil War ended that.

The very American story of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance.

Who gets labeled a "narco-terrorist" is all a matter of foreign policy.

A new history examines the long history of a radical and sometimes conservative concept.

The Alabama sheriff who is remembered as a saint—by everyone who isn’t black.

The Early Republic’s maritime jurisprudence is even more relevant given the immense power of the modern executive.

Trump has reinvented Reagan’s old attack, with one key twist.

The standard story of 1960s art is one of Abstract Expressionism leading into Pop Art and minimalism. The Whitney offers a different one centered on surrealism.

Po'pay, a Tewa religious leader, led the Pueblo Revolt, the most successful Indigenous rebellion in what’s now the United States.

Before Donald Trump's takeover proposal for Gaza, another New York real estate magnate had his own plans for the region.

Enigmatic, bigoted, prominent figure of the Confederacy—and one of the highest-ranking Jew in the history of American government. What do we do with him now?

Anti-Chinese hate took vicious and violent forms. Religion was at the heart of it.

“It is not a proper function of the Department of Defense to make allowances for amounts needed to help stimulate the economy.”

What we learn by tracing rebellions from Africa to the Americas.

Each age’s premier industrialist has had appalling politics.

What does history tell us about presidents who have tried to push the limits of the system?

Death in the magnetic age.

New evidence helps resolve enduring mysteries about a 1758 incident that nearly cost the future president his life—and shaped his views on the battles to come.

As the war over American social studies classrooms heats up, the curriculum is in the crosshairs.

Trump has upended a long tradition of claiming, however hypocritically, that foreign intervention is not about power or profit.

How Americans came to see health as a personal responsibility.

Washington believed that civility toward other nations was a strategy to preserve independence, not a concession.

A visual archive of Jan. 6, 2021, through the lenses of those who were there.

An underdressed reporter journeys across icy, barren Greenland—and into Trump’s bored, nineteenth-century brain.

The silver raised in Havana helped finance the Yorktown campaign, revealing the imperial foundations of American independence.