Excerpts

An island eroding into the bay offers tantalizing clues about when and how humans first made their way into North America.

The story of American abolitionists who, after Emancipation, pivoted from antislavery campaigns to animal welfare advocacy.

Herders carved names, slogans, nude silhouettes and more into the trees around them. Now, researchers rush to find the arborglyphs before they disappear.

With over 100 lawsuits dismissed, a last-ditch effort is underway to force the city to put into legal record what happened after that day.

In a momentous couple of years, the young United States added more than a million square miles of territory, including Texas and California. 

On three histories of the Biden White House, and the 2024 election.

The moral terrain of crowdfunding is fueled by two persistent social ideologies: the dual, and intertwined, myths of meritocracy and the “deserving poor.”

The West Florida revolt in the Age of Revolutions.

The failed assassination of Donald Trump might not have any lasting effect on the election or politics in general.

On the meaning and use of rivers and other waterways.

For a brief moment in history, Frances Thompson was Memphis’ biggest scandal. Her life paints a different picture of our civil rights legacy.

Anti-Asian immigration restrictions led male Punjabi farm workers in California to marry Mexican and Mexican American women, creating new cultural bonds.

Even as the primary targets of immigration restrictionism have shifted, the consequences for immigrants remain profoundly shaped by the system created in 1924.

Despite an unwelcoming political climate and a dearth of LGBTQ+ protections, LGBTQ+ Southerners have persisted.

The histories of the U.S. and Czechia are linked by multiple presidents of both countries.

During the 1984 campaign, the 73-year-old president meandered his way through his face-off against Walter Mondale, prompting questions about his mental acuity.

People who study the past don’t always have special insight into politics. Recent events have made that crystal clear.

70 years since President Árbenz was ousted for standing up to Chiquita, the firm might finally be held to account for its ties to a far-right paramilitary group in Colombia.

Finding a story in the ways Robert Ray Hamilton, John Dudley Sargent, and Edith Sargent weren’t quite forgotten. 

A pre-history of the sentence diagrams that were once commonplace in the American classroom.

The rules governing everything from “Big Brother” to “The Real Housewives” started three decades ago, with a radical experiment on MTV.

Tragedy seldom unifies Americans today.

The painting of Mary Ann Tritt Cassell is likely the first known portrait commissioned by an American born into slavery.

A mythical creature that lurks in the pinelands of New Jersey has served as a reminder of the horrors that result when reproductive freedoms are destroyed.

To understand the racism of the drug war, we must look to the ways policymakers sought to protect white suburban youth.

Norman Mailer’s generation learned to “write like men.” But their female contemporaries from Mary McCarthy to Diana Trilling pioneered a more enduring style.

The Supreme Court has invested the presidency with quasi-monarchial powers, repudiating the foundational principle of the rule of law.

On the 50th anniversary of “Chinatown” and the beginning of the end of petromodernity.

What was in the water circa 1992?

No, "history" does not tell us that the Democrats shouldn't change their nominee.

On our millennia-long love-hate relationship with getting in the water.

A new book brings to life the war in the South.

As the Supreme Court invents a law to negate all others, Chief Justice John Roberts now ranks just below Roger Taney.

The 19th century recovery of John Winthrop's sermon, "A City on a Hill."

On John Winthrop’s oft-misunderstood use of the phrase “a city upon a hill” to describe the New World.

Reporter Catherine Moore visits the first hospital in the New World and finds out why the “public plan” in the Virginia colony may have had its drawbacks.

For every moment of historical significance, there is a figure — often hidden — who fed the figures we do remember.

Estimating life and death in Iraq and Gaza.

Deindustrialization has helped create a right-wing turn in many Midwestern towns. Long traditions of labor militancy can explain why it hasn’t in others.

In 1987, the Supreme Court came within one vote of eliminating capital punishment in Georgia because of of racial disparities.

Fanny Angelina Hesse introduced agar to the life sciences in 1881. A trove of unpublished family papers sheds new light on her many accomplishments.

The Freedom Schools curriculums developed in 1964 remain urgently needed, especially in our era of book bans and backlash.

Fifty years after ruling against a corrupt president, the Court has now decided that presidents are above the law.

Activists including W. E .B. Du Bois in the United States and Lajpat Rai in India drew connections between Black American and Indian experiences of white rule.

The North’s fruitful partnership with Liberian farmers fueled a steady supply of an essential beverage.

The peach industry represented a new, scientifically driven economy for Georgia, but it also depended on the rhythms and racial stereotypes of cotton farming.

The hard labor behind what was once one of the nation's most significant industries.

I would know.

How did the sensuality, sexuality, and homosociality of exercise create intimate possibilities for Black women in postwar America?

American art and the Cold War.