Excerpts

The U.S. government’s failure to recognize nuclear Downwinders in New Mexico is part of a broader failure to reckon with the legacies of the Manhattan Project.

The journey of America’s police force from a non-professional night watch to a highly visible and professional force.

The popularity of tanning rose in the early twentieth century, when bronzed skin signaled a life of leisure, not labor.

A look at the psychedlic-inspired music scene of Detroit.

Kamala Harris is the heir to a political lineage that dates back to a chain-smoking, hard-drinking mastermind elected to Congress from San Francisco in 1964.

A new book argues that we misunderstand the forces that drove the notorious slave rebel.

You are not Gen X. You are not a Millennial. Unless you are a Baby Boomer, you are nothing.

Two books that remind us that tone and timbre, musical style and sound, matter to history.

In the Mad Men era of magazine journalism, Virginia Kraft was a globe-trotting writer and a deadly shot with a rifle. Why hasn't anyone heard of her?

An animation historian on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon charged with electrifying everything in the early 20th century.

The anxiety about “Mexicanization” that ran through Reconstruction-Era politics, as Americans saw disturbing political parallels with their southern neighbor.

The author of "Cahokia Jazz" reflects on the similarities between historical fiction and science fiction, and the imaginative space opened by archival silences.

Of the presidential elections in early America, few have stressed the themes of sex and gender so spicily as the heated contest of 1856.

A prison is a difficult thing to kill.

Eighty years ago this month, the Kennedy who might have been president was killed on a secret mission over England.

A statistical analysis of how music composition evolved over time.

Ironically, Chevron deference — which the conservative Supreme Court scrapped last month — began as a conservative legal tool.

Douglass elaborated a political theory attuned to the differential character of law as it applied to slaves and other outlaws.

From religious liberty to religious violence, it helps to get our facts straight.

Revisiting Meredith v. Fair, we get the inside story of how critical race theory was developed in the years after Brown v. Board of Education.

Chronicling the emergence of a unique blend of counterculture and Christianity.

Photographs of wild flowers taken by photographers from a Christian utopian community that settled in East Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th century.

To defeat the leftist Sandinistas, Washington provided aid to the Contras along with a crazy psychological warfare anticommunist manual.

America should be ashamed of slavery, but black Americans do not bear the burden of shame.

An exhibit featuring public radio and television programs broadcast over 65 years that explore American agricultural life.

How history textbooks reinforced narratives of racism, and the fight to change those books from the 1940s to the present.

Born enslaved, John Andrew Jackson spent his life fighting for freedom as a fugitive, abolitionist, lecturer and writer.

Times Square’s decline can be dated to the Depression, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the bottom fell out.

I never knew I lived in an oil town until I went looking for the concealed infrastructure of fossil fuel production.

More importantly, our misappropriation of “puritan” has allowed scholars to ignore and the public to misunderstand religion.

"But he'd have to acknowledge that the soul of his country is southern; the soul of his country is black."

Stop Cop City meets the establishment.

Maurice Isserman’s history of American communism documents both its achievements and its fatal obeisance to Soviet doctrines.

It is hard not to figure the 1968 election as inaugurating the cultural and political polarisation of the American electorate so evident today.

It was an important turning point, but by no means were the riots the first act of Queer resistance.

Defining a social type is a way of defining an era. What can the time of the young urban professional tell us about our own?

Seventeenth-century maps and conflicts in colonial New England.

The history of sheriffs suggests we need to pay attention to what our local sheriffs do, vote in local elections, and choose our sheriffs wisely.

The convergence of economy and politics in the Sino-US relationship via Jonathan Chatwin’s “The Southern Tour” and Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson’s “Made in China.”

Plus: One historian’s about-face on the Communist record.

A consideration of the evolution of Baldwin’s views on Zionism.

An excess of restrictions has taken a very real toll on the lives of everyday Americans. Their stories must be told.

It wasn’t just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated, newly unearthed documents show.

The enslaved Prince Whipple acutely felt the contradiction between American ideals and his condition.

A new study claims that songs have become less complex. But the magic of these short, sharp tunes can’t be so easily distilled.

Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s dark vision of the future.

One young conservative lawyer would lead a determined fight to maintain Lewis Powell’s blindfolded race neutrality.

The Democratic Party, and the US political system as a whole, is a very strange beast.

Frank Capra’s 1941 drama carries forward the populist themes of his other movies, only with a much darker premise.

In “The Heartland,” Kristin L. Hoganson says America’s Midwest has been more connected to global events than remembered.