Excerpts

Wayfinding through history and design of the cookbook.

The 1900 Galveston hurricane changed the way we deal with severe weather. But as Hurricane Helene showed, there are still lessons to be learned.

Less about morality than about rights, the Mormon War of 1858 hinged on the issue of polygamy, pitting a Utah community against federal authorities.

Why did it take so long for the U.S. Army to authorize the enlistment of Black men as soldiers?

Empty chairs, empty tables, and the dismantling of the American Dream.

In North Carolina, a Black farmer purchased the plantation where his ancestors were enslaved—and is reclaiming his family’s story and the soil beneath his feet.

Between 40% and 50% of children didn’t live past 5 in the US during the 19th century. Authors documented the common but no less gutting grief of losing a child.

The notion of political realignment in the Lone Star State is older than you think. It goes back to Giant, an acidic novel by Edna Ferber.

An Eisenhower-era initiative holds key lessons for Trump’s immigration policy.

"Published by the Author" explores the resourcefulness of Black writers of the nineteenth century.

Baltimore is Native American land — that's the first thing I want you to know.

A history that is as tactical as it is analytical, as global as it is local, and as based in love as it is in politics.

The meritocratic pitch was emblematic of Democrats’ long march away from working-class voters.

If Trump’s pick to lead the F.B.I. gets confirmed, the Bureau could be politicized in ways that even its notorious first director would have rejected.

The ruling class used false claims about white women’s sexual virtue to regulate sexuality. But the “white slavery” panic was also about race, class and labor.

In 1893, a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the Islands’ sovereign government. What does America owe Hawai‘i now?

The incoming Trump administration wants to take away citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants. Here’s how.

The closeted right-wing operative has become a tragic character in the American repertory.

We see what we want to see from philosophers such as Locke not because he wrote for our time (or “all time”) but because we imagine he did.

Why should American exceptionalism end at the red-light district?

Across the history of the U.S. abortion-rights movement, it has also been a matter of equality.

For decades, Houston families like mine have helped keep the flame of independence burning.

LGBTQ voters overwhelmingly went for Harris, but the idea that gay voters are always going to be solidly blue is a myth.

Am 1884 guide to vice and crime by the founder of the world’s largest private detective agency.

What is an apology from the President of the United States worth if reparations do not include cessation of settler colonial violence?

Private insurance companies have long dominated the provision of social security in the United States, but resistance is growing.

Ideas about history still prevailing in the liberal resistance to Trump keep pushing us backward.

James Graham Wilson makes a compelling case that the under-celebrated example of Paul Nitze is both instructive and worthy of our emulation.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s oldest, most direct ties to the Holy Land were established by a Palestinian Arab.

A new book revamps Newark's reputation as unsexy, violent, destitute, defiantly declaring it “a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance.”

The ideas he popularized will continue to shape evangelicalism for generations to come.

On both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom—even as real estate has proven itself to be relentlessly unequal.

Using film and advertising to sell capitalism and nationalism to immigrants in the early 20th century.

Purposely brutalizing psychological experiments may have confirmed Theodore Kaczynski’s still-forming belief in the evil of science while he was in college.

The Northeast caught fire this fall, in a way that recalls its past. History has some lessons about how to manage the region’s fire seasons to come.

Susie Orbach’s 1978 book is a fascinating snapshot of diet and physical culture in a very different era.

A recent Otis Redding biography examines what was and what could have been, 50 years after tragedy struck.

For more than a century, the American government has surveilled and harassed activists from marginalized communities.

At universities, American Marxism has led to good scholarship, but it’s also encouraged hyper-specialization and the use of impenetrable jargon.

Once again, the crematorium sits silent.

On the rise of the narcotic farm model, a radical reimagining of the nation’s approach to addiction.

One plantation tourist manager said covering slavery would be like “trying to tell the story at Disneyland of how poorly the employees at Disney are treated.”

The popular way to keep warm outdoors owes a debt to World War II–era clothing science.

When the future arrived, it felt…ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?

Women abolitionists held annual Christmas bazaars to raise money for the cause; these fairs sold everything from needlework to books to Parisian dresses.

When polarization lacks clear consequences, Americans are left with "a grin without a cat: a politics with only weak policy influence or institutional ties."

Starting with Obama, American presidents embraced the idea of arresting China’s rise, opening the door to Trump’s trade wars and hawkishness.

Commentary on America’s 40th president often misses how the Gipper blended principles and pragmatism for a truly conservative statesmanship.

Defenses of the recent killing of Jordan Neely suggest that the film’s reactionary, Wild West–style vigilante violence still holds the imagination of many.

America's public schools were founded on the ideal of uniting rich and poor, but inequality persists due to racial, income, and systemic divides.