Excerpts

The latest biography of the great transcendentalist captures the paradoxes of his Yankee mind.

Neoliberalism isn’t just a set of economic precepts—it’s also an architecture of laws passed to reinforce those precepts. Those laws must be changed.

Myths to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars.

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing.

American foreign aid to Israel has long relied on the support of American Jews. But American Jews have never been unified in their support for Israel.

The question of villainy has always been a complicated issue for African Americans in film.

A century ago, the party took a record 103 ballots and 16 days of intense, violent debate to choose a presidential nominee.

A new book conveys in dramatic detail what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery. Another addresses the love of God and country that helped her do so.

Think this year’s Democratic convention is going to be nuts? One hundred years ago, Democrats took 103 ballots—and more than two weeks—to choose a candidate.

Appeals against the war in Gaza are often framed through the lens of the future: “You will regret having been silent.” What about the present tense?

John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke” renders the signal political battles of the present in an entirely new light.

Looking back on the environmentalist and anti-globalization movements of the 1990s.

Despite wrenching economic and political changes in the country, Democrats and Republicans keep finding themselves nearly tied in election after election.

How Earhart and other women pilots of her day helped overcome Americans’ skepticism about flight.

On the Loyalists who fled during the Revolutionary War – like Jacob Bailey, who saw freedom from tyranny with the British in Nova Scotia.

An exhibition in Seattle spotlights the Black artists and performers who called Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden home between the 1930s and the 1980s.

On the transformation of Mary Harris into Mother Jones.

The fight over nuclear waste on Yucca Mountain.

U.S. imperialism and private enterprise in the region have created ecological peril.

The Phrygian cap, also known as the liberty cap, emerged as a potent symbol in 18th-century America and France.

The law is routinely blamed for a very real problem it had nothing to do with.

A touristy dive bar, an unfinished liberation movement, and now a visitor center for the National Park Service.

An archaeologist explains why a museum keeps so many bones from the Jones-Miller site, an ice age bison kill on the North American plains.

Union workers in the US weapons industry present a paradox for anti-war labor activists, but a history of “conversion” campaigns offers a route.

A poignant connection between the erosions of landscape and memory at a former Japanese internment camp in California.

Past conservative figures seem moderate by today's standards.

In defense of the furred and the hoofed.

The political upheaval of 1824 changed America. The same could happen in 2024.

An interview with Taylor Brown, author of the novel "Rednecks."

On the town’s history & architecture.

“An Ideal for Living” explores the fascinating backstory of a mini music format.

While the phrase "between a woman and her doctor" has been used to protect abortion access, it also reflects physicians' outsized power.

Brea Baker on Black land ownership, historical injustice, and the hope for Black Americans to own more than one percent of the land.

Alan Taylor’s case for thinking of it as a continental conflict.

The annual rite of passage has always been more about the ambivalence of adults than the amusement of children.

The warnings in Cold War history.

The 1993 “Hold the Line” experiment.

America is suffering from a severe housing shortage. A crucial tool may lie in the Constitution.

Many recoil at the thought of stronger political parties. But revitalized parties could be exactly what our ailing democracy needs.

Frederick Douglass was introduced to the idea of universal human rights after traveling to Ireland and meeting with Irish nationalist leaders.

The end of the big-city columnist.

How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture.

The sport's greatest figures played ball in the Deep South amid the racism and bigotry that would later make Birmingham the center of the civil rights movement.

The history of American Communism shows that dogma and fervor are no substitute for popular support.

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has been quietly rolling back a longstanding consensus over cruel and unusual punishment.

Five decades after the desegregation effort, a civil-rights scholar questions its framing.

How a Hollywood marketing campaign was responsible for the Ten Commandments being displayed in public all across the country.

Naked runners used to disrupt events seemingly all the time. Why’d they stop?

The Scottish-born naturalist’s early years in the United States.

How Black artists made modernism their own.