Excerpts

In the early nineties, the country turned against the establishment and right-wing populists thrived. A new history reassesses their impact.

Who created it? What was it meant for? And how did it come to be what it is today?

The images, diaries, and ephemera in Grand Valley State University’s Civil War and Slavery Collection reveal the cold realities of Abraham Lincoln’s world.

In the wake of the 1964 Harlem riots, June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s plan to redesign the neighborhood suggested new possibilities for urban life.

And neither do white players from the segregation era.

The long arc of racist plunder through local tax codes is shocking—or, well, maybe it’s not, really.

The rise of the right remade the GOP—and fundamentally changed how parties operated in American politics.

A firsthand account of freedom’s earliest celebrations.

Promoted as a social and economic savior, the US federal interstate highway system acted as a tool to promote racial injustices.

From the tomato to the hamburger bun, the invention has transformed not just what we eat but taste itself.

Moscow and Washington trapped themselves in a cycle of fear over Iran.

Ann Powers’s deeply personal biography of Joni Mitchell looks at how a generation of listeners came to identify with the folk singer’s intimate songs.

Everyone’s heard of Jim Henson. It’s time to give Bonnie Erickson — creator of beloved Muppets and mascots including the Phillie Phanatic — her due.

In ‘When the Clock Broke,’ John Ganz revisits the era of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot to find the roots of our populist moment.

How James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others embraced a new Black humanism.

The intersection of Black music and queer identity.

Once a powerful voice in the Black press, Coleman all but disappeared from the literary landscape of the American Midwest after her death in 1948.

Do Americans in rural places really “marinate in a sense of loss and perpetual disappointment”?

Alexander Hamilton’s anonymous essay challenged the voting citizens of New York to hold fast to the truth when deciding to ratify (or not) the US Constitution.

How one activist helped turn evangelical women into the backbone of right-wing conservatism.

A conversation with the legal scholar on why it is unusual that the Constitution is core to American national identity.

Recovering a life in fragments, Arthur Bowler in slavery and freedom.

“The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports” upends long-held assumptions about trans people’s participation in sports.

First exhibited in 1878, Charles F. Ritchel's dirigible was about as wacky, dangerous and impractical as any airship ever launched.

Public schools are crucial infrastructures of the reproduction of social inequality and the US carceral state.

On the porous, ever-shifting boundaries between science and speculation.

Power and choice in the 1930s novel.

Corporations sold Americans on the chasing arrows — while stripping the logo of its worth.

We compiled Reconstruction-era documents to identify 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans given land—only to have it returned to their enslavers.

Yuval Levin urges us to take America’s greatest constitutional thinker, James Madison, as our lodestar.

On (not) voting.

The Insurrection Act is a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States code, giving presidents unimaginable emergency power. No President has abused it. Yet.

Human bondage was big business in the antebellum US, and men weren’t the only ones cashing in.

In throwing up new roadblocks to the use of private money to redress racial and economic inequality, the Fearless Fund ruling is antihistorical.

During Japanese-American incarceration, what happened to mixed-race families and individuals?

As Cornel West is receiving ballot access help from Republicans, 20 years ago Al Sharpton’s campaign for president was largely orchestrated by Roger Stone.

Monopolies across the grocery supply chain squeeze consumers and small-business owners alike. Big Data will only entrench those dynamics further.

By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Blair LM Kelley’s book, "Black Folk," helps tell the larger story of American democracy.

Its agents are often depicted as malevolent puppet masters—or as bumbling idiots. The truth is even less comforting.

For more than two decades, a community of committed internet users has been chewing over the famous Londoner’s diary.

Éamon de Valera was accused of attempting an armed uprising against the government. Then he made a daring jailbreak, and later became president of Ireland.

She remade the American songbook in her image, uprooting the very meaning of musical performance.

Black citizens fought for justice and were met with violence. They persevered.

Historian Manisha Sinha argues that the Second Republic lasted decades longer than most histories state and achieved wider gains.

Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of civilians killed by a carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose.

One of the best-known icons of modern society is a classic example of a symbol—it’s easy to spot, but hard to explain. Who came up with it?

When labor found a common cause — and enemy — with the abolition movement.

What we can learn from the history of maritime folk music.

Successes that came when presidents protected student protesters from outside meddling are worth remembering when students return to campus.

Country music boosters rebranded the genre and tied it to America's military mission as a way to build popularity.