Excerpts

Over the 1830s, Hamblin transformed the fortunes of the Bowery by featuring melodramas starring young women, but this wasn't without issues.

On Nathanael Greene’s inauspicious start.

Why few Native Americans are celebrating the centennial of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

John Ganz offers a whirlwind tour of the cranks, conservatives, and con artists who helped remake the American right at the turn of the 21st century.

Edwin Forrest’s 1851 divorce trial.

Reports in the underground press demonstrate how Juneteenth has been celebrated as both a social and political gathering in the twentieth century.

“Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing…” — James Joyce, Ulysses

“Who controls the past,” George Orwell wrote, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” So it has been with baseball.

When it became clear that the United States and its allies couldn’t “liberate” Eastern Europe through psychological war and covert ops, they turned to sports.

Smog first came to Los Angeles suddenly, like a stranded hitchhiker. It was July 8th, 1943, and we were at war.

Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?

The magical in-betweenness—and surprising epidemiological history—of the porch.

Jewish masculinity and the New York intellectuals.

In many ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for grown-ups.

The cottages’ modest design provided entry-level homes after the Great Chicago Fire.

Skateboarding was considered a silly and childish phenomenon for much of its existence.

Black wet nurses made a show of militance in 1937.

Far from a novel form of populism, J. D. Vance’s appeals are indistinguishable from the economic vision of the 1970s John Birch Society.

Retracing the history of Chinatown in Los Angeles using old Chinese restaurant menus as a guide.

A tour through the travel journals that visually document early road trips of the American West.

The conflict between Red and Blue America is a clash of national mythologies.

Until the late 1960s, the Democratic Party could have simply anointed a replacement for President Biden. Now it's not so easy.

Shedding light on the truth of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

The evangelical psychologist gained influence with millions of families through decades of parenting advice focused on strict discipline.

On the widespread boycotts of British-made goods in the American Colonies.

On the movement away from midwifery towards hospital births.

A new documentary chronicles efforts to keep rap lyrics from being used by prosecutors, combatting a long-standing trend of criminalizing this art form.

Christian and Jewish themes influenced the world of art around one of jazz’s greatest singers.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans replaced all its public schools with charter schools. A new book recovers the decades of work the storm disrupted.

The Year 2000 computer problem has become a punchline in recent years, but the CrowdStrike outage shows the joke's on us.

Caught between steel mills, suburbs and a hard place, the 15,000-acre site is a fantasia of biodiversity—and a case study for hard-fought conservation.

U.S. sanctions have surged over the last two decades and are now in effect on almost one-third of all nations. But are they doing more harm than we realize?

A collection of interviews with rescue workers who responded to the disaster.

On May 10th, 1869, the entire nation was waiting for the moment a silver hammer struck a golden spike, creating the first massive breaking news story.

Why conservatives killed America’s federally funded theater.

Following Napoleon’s fall, international secret societies emerged promoting dissent from absolutist forms of power and sharing ideologies and iconographies.

Dr. Ruth left a legacy of sexual candor and the need to defend pleasure as a universal right—a conversation that is more relevant today than ever.

Revisiting his first book, "The Enormous Room," a reader can get a sense of everything appealing and appalling in his work.

A new book takes on a diagnosis invented to cover up police killings: that men of color are “combusting as a result of their aggressiveness.”

The Roberts Court has made the current crisis of American democracy perpetual.

Kushner was a top official in a Trump administration that sharply restricted immigration and refugee admissions. His grandparents were Holocaust refugees.

American law should protect the right of individuals to engage in charitable acts.

It has suddenly become popular to cast NATO as the first benign military alliance in history, without concealed politics.

It’s difficult to see how these profound antipathies and fears will dissipate soon through any normal political processes.

Jews in the industry called for the Academy Museum to highlight the men who created the movie business. A voice in my head went, Uh-oh.

When a term signifies something that does not exist, we need to examine our use of it.

The pulsating anger in San Francisco 60 years ago became the party's animating spirit.

On the impact of systematic oppression on indigenous cuisine in the United States.

French theorists said that American native species were inferior to European ones—the former President went to great lengths to show that they were wrong.

In the 1820s, Sarah Hale, a New England widow and the editor of Godey’s Ladies Book made it her mission to get Thanksgiving recognized as a national holiday.