Excerpts

Undoing the politics of fear will require us to reckon with the legacies of nativism that divert our attention from the greatest threats to our health.

Wearing shiny black capes and practicing infantry drills had nothing to do with preparing for civil war.

A former systems operator logs back in to the original computer-based social network.

The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act sought to assimilate Native people into white society. But the legislation, signed by President Calvin Coolidge, fell short.

Debunking myths about the Pony Express.

The MLB incorporated the statistics of 2,300 Black athletes who played in the segregated Negro Leagues, making the Josh Gibson its new all-time batting leader.

Rethinking our historical monuments.

Smith understood why so many white Americans, especially white Southerners, struggled to accept that their society was not so far removed from Hitler’s Germany.

A conversation with Corey Robin on the surprisingly weak presidency of Donald Trump.

Rereading Priscilla Wald’s "Contagious" and Nancy Tomes’ "Gospel of Germs" amidst a 21st-century pandemic.

The new interactive tool accompanies a study of school enrollment data, which shows that segregation has worsened in recent decades.

Chinese immigration and the Immigration Act of 1924.

The legacy of the Immigration Act of 1924 and the launching of the Border Patrol, which inaugurated the most restrictive era of US immigration until our own.

For decades, blind programmers have been creating the tools their community needs.

How did taxes become something we "do"?

Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language declared Americans free from the tyranny of British institutions and their vocabularies.

Abolitionist and writer John Swanson Jacobs on reclaiming liberty in a land of unfreedom.

Descendants of the first settlers in Nicodemus are working to preserve and share a story of grit, perseverance, self-governance, and homecomings.

America's environmental movement has always been moralistic, which has made it bad at weighing tradeoffs. This accounts for its successes and also its failures.

Black women activism within documentary films in the 1960s United States.

As the legend of the singer–poet–sex symbol grows, fans rarely acknowledge his conservative streak.

"The Reckoning," Robin Blackburn’s monumental history, offers a dizzying account of the politics behind slavery's rise and fall.

A new book traces "the rise and fall of Pete Rose, and the last glory days of baseball."

We can thank the postal service for establishing the foundations of the American tradition of communications confidentiality.

Betty Ford and the public eye.

Large language models can do a lot of things. But can they write like an 18th-century fur trader?

When Thomas Kuhn coined the term, he wasn’t referring simply to “out of the box” thinking.

When I moved to Lower Manhattan in 1967, I decided to make a picture of every building in the neighbourhood before the city knocked it down.

Wilfred Reilly reviews two books critiquing modern ideas of race, social status, and diversity, advocating in favor of racial color-blindness.

Injecting the world’s deadliest toxin into one’s eye was always going to be a hard sell.

An overlooked history of selective policing at Columbia has undermined the safety of those within as well as beyond campus walls.

In 1924, sociologist and social reformer Caroline Bartlett Crane designed an award-winning tiny home in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

With the Dow sit-ins of the 1960s, students drew attention to links between the campus, war, and imperialism.

Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day.

What started as a solemn commemoration of dead Civil War soldiers has become a celebration of summer. Here's why that makes total sense.

Ed Dwight Jr. trained to go to the moon, but racism in the selection process kept him out of space.

How we rediscovered the tragedy in Mississippi that ushered us into the Great Migration.

The evolution of the right to privacy.

On the history of literature masquerading as primary source.

Whether you like Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert, Joe Rogan, or Sean Hannity, you're engaging the media world created by the late radio host.

How political figures have framed anti-LGBTQ bigotry as being pro-child and pro-parent.

The legendary actor left a mark in both film history and an industry fraught with self-regard.

A conversation with John David Waiheʻe III, former Governor of Hawai‘i, on the U.S. apology to the Hawaiian people.

The dumping of tons of tea in protest set the stage for the American Revolution and was a window on the culture and attitudes of the time.

The carcinogenic effects of asbestos have been known for decades. We should have banned it long ago.

On how the fringe ideas of a set of American neoliberals became a new and pervasive way of life.

Advertising went from being an embarrassing activity to a legitimate part of every company’s business plans—despite scant evidence that it worked.

Paul Cuffe was the first Black American to formally meet with a sitting president at the White House.

It wasn’t really Jews or Palestinians. It was the U.S. Congress, which closed American borders 100 years ago this month.

A century after three Tejano men were shot to death, the story their family tells is different than the official account. Whose story counts as Texas history?