Excerpts

William Bradford Huie’s newly released research notes show he suspected more than two men tortured and killed Emmett Till, but suggest that he left it out.

Heather Cox Richardson argues that there are two Americas: one interested in equality, the other in hierarchy. But it's not that simple.

Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.

The U.S. military operated a Grand Turk missile tracking station for 30 years, with limited local benefits, highlighting American expansionism's impact.

The success of the movie ‘The Silent Scream,’ made by onetime abortionist Bernard Nathanson, continues to influence the pro-life narrative.

A public uprising forced Boston to prioritize fighting smallpox over the economy in 1792.

William Rehnquist went from a lonely dissenter to an institutionalist chief—and his opinions are all the rage among the court’s current conservatives.

The gradual decline of the fade-out in popular music.

The weapons infrastructure of the Cold War is now getting rented out on Airbnb or memorialized as patriotic kitsch.

The election of 1801 offers a first-hand example of how current events can offer historians new perspectives on the past.

Inside the weird synergies that launched the videogaming industry—and made the Pentagon fantasies in Call of Duty its stock in trade.

Tales of strange, nocturnal people haunt the region—and so do theories about who they were, from a lost Welsh "tribe" to aliens.

From the ruins of the Spanish Civil War to air force bases in Texas.

Maine passed its first abortion statute in 1840, not long after the pardon of Dr. Call. Could there be a connection?

On the origins of America's hegemonic foreign policy.

“The Bookshop” tells the story of American bookstores in thirteen types. Its true subject is not how bookstore can survive, but how they should be.

John Andrew Jackson spent a night at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home as he fled north. Why do so few traces of his visit remain?

Fighting over the legacy of a conservative hero in the era of Trump.

While letting justices serve during “good behavior” was designed to encourage impartiality, it now tends to promote the opposite effect.

Two striking reminders of the game-changing potential of great speed and its limited value unless accompanied by other essential skills.

As George Gallup pioneered new methods of surveying the public, The Nation opined on their dangers—and democratic possibilities.

Make one of President George Washington's favorite cocktails.

It just might be the great American art form. You can thank the residents of Salem for that.

John Dickinson's contributions to the Constitution continue to reverberate today.

How the younger brother of the famous general set out to destroy the scourge of monopoly power.

Researchers measured lawmakers’ wealth and found that those whose Southern ancestors owned slaves before abolition have a higher net worth today.

Sometimes an accused witch was believed to have had a dog who would do her bidding; to others, the devil appeared in the form of a dog.

The tariffs he keeps babbling about didn’t make that decade great. They helped usher in a depression.

Do pop culture interventions in presidential elections make a difference?

A truly Christian postliberalism would imagine and enact an alternative modernity with a different standard of progress.

The media narrative used to discredit urban rebellions as violent betrayals of the civil rights movement has been attached to protests ever since.

After World War II, canned foods became more and more common, along with a smorgasbord of pre-prepared, processed foods such as SpaghettiOs.

Rising on the lands of an ancient agricultural system, Memphis has a long history of negotiating social conflict and change while singing the blues.

In Winn Parish, an ancient salt dome has sustained life for centuries.

In 1956, The New York Times, dismayed by wayward polls in the prior presidential race, sent teams of reporters across the nation to better gauge public opinion.

While the Citizens United case created major shifts in campaign contributions and spending, an earlier decision played a bigger role in campaign finance laws.

The Black Legion was a white supremacist fascist group headquartered in Lima, Ohio. Its worst deeds are lost to memory, but they shouldn’t be.

Progressive forces in US labor took a stand in solidarity with trade unionists facing murderous repression in El Salvador.

A new work of nonfiction revives a history that some would sooner see forgotten.

What can be learned from how people responded to false alarms about nuclear war in the late 1950s?

Oscar Hartzell convinced thousands of Americans that they could get a piece of the Sir Francis Drake estate—a multibillion-dollar inheritance that didn’t exist.

Two Carvers and the fight for fair desegregation.

Why did the U.S. allow its national communications markets to be run by expansive monopolists?

Matt Stoller charts the shifts in American attitudes toward corporate consolidation.

Clinton’s role in decoupling the Democratic Party from mainstream labor, first in Arkansas and then nationally, had dire consequences.

Because Martin Van Buren was an unsuccessful president, his more significant contributions to the nation’s political life have also been obscured.

The driving question of scholarship should be “what is the evidence for your argument?” Instead, it has become “whose side are you on?”

“Mary Mallon was a cook. And her story, first and foremost, is the story of a cook.”

Jeremy Dauber's new book explores the themes and origins of the American horror genre.

Rouse reveals the hidden queer histories of suffragists like Alice Morgan Wright, who balanced activism with private, erased relationships.