Excerpts

“Postpartum depression” encompasses various debilitating changes in mood that can occur after giving birth. How did that language come to be?

The uncompromising idealism of student protesters is rooted in social and economic isolation and detachment.

Why one journalist worked with Black American families to adopt mixed-race German children after World War II.

Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.

Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?

This election year, two women of South Asian descent—Kamala Harris and Usha Vance—take center stage. What can their identities tell us about their approach?

On Joan of Arc’s much-maligned and forgotten haircut.

Black internationalism broadened our politics of solidarity.

Fake photographs of the US president sparked calls for regulation of analog photo editing.

When Nixon practiced law, he declined divorce cases because he disliked frank sexual talk from women. Trump asked Playboy to run a “Girls of Trump” feature.

Horace Greeley ran against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant in November 1872. Twenty-four days later, he died of unknown causes at a private mental health facility.

While it is rare for foreign policy differences between the political parties to affect electoral outcomes, it has happened before.

Harris is taking a page from the playbook that has long helped women advance the quest for equality.

We took a closer look at how Americans’ views and experiences have evolved on a variety of topics over the last 20 years.

American democracy has been haunted by the spectre of a Caesar-type figure since the birth of the republic. Have such fears ever been justified?

How researchers analyzed limestone to determine the age and origins of the grave maker, which marked the final resting place of a prominent Jamestown colonist.

Harris' rhetoric about working at McDonald's shows how Democrats have rethought their 1990s emphasis on fast food jobs.

When FDR found out how beholden New York politicians were to mobsters, he ordered the Seabury commission to investigate.

The controversial career of John E. Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who wrote best-selling books on UFO abduction.

A changing political mood among evangelicals has many believers imagining the end of the world differently than they used to.

An excerpt from the new book "Willie, Waylon, and the Boys."

The backlash against an effort to resettle 200,000 evacuees holds lessons for future disasters.

Some Americans who have lost faith in traditional institutions are finding spirituality in this Denver church—and in themselves.

The paper angered colonial officials by repeating a scandalous rumor and condemning a British alliance with the Mohawk.

Jonathan Schell’s account of the US military’s destruction of the village of Ben Suc in Vietnam laid bare the problem with many American interventions.

Anti-immigrant think tanks and advocacy groups operated on the margins until Trump became president. Now they have molded not only the GOP but also Democrats.

In contemporary publishing, novels fixated on the past rather than the present have garnered the most attention and prestige.

Originalism is not so much an idea as a legal-industrial complex divided into three parts—the academic, the jurisprudential, and the political.

Many vignettes of sheriffs in action are dramatic and alarming. But how representative are they?

How a single phrase or blunder can end up dominating our political discourse.

Culture wars have a long and divisive history in American politics, with gender, race and religion continuing to inflame public opinion.

The deep roots of debt relief activism in the United States.

The late telejournalist was a pioneer of informal diplomacy between American and Soviet citizens.

On the literary and cinematic legacy of white supremacy in the United States.

The path to winning the Black vote no longer runs through the church door.

The court’s ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson involves highly selective readings of the historiography and a willful misrepresentation of history.

As the nation’s highest court debated Native sovereignty, I was in the archives, uncovering family stories entwined with those debates.

Some scholars say that it’s to blame for our political dysfunction—and that we need to start over.

Newly-released FBI files show a lot of strange threats against the former secretary of state’s safety—and say a lot about 1970s America.

Scientists and lawmakers in the 70s knew more than we think they did about climate change and the impacts of fossil fuel regulations.

The relationship between presidents and vice presidents is unique and often personal. Sometimes, internal divisions spill out into public life.

For American politicians, the obsession with appealing to the everyman dates back to the raucous campaign of 1840.

Scarry’s guides to life both reflected and bolstered kids’ lived experience, and in some cases even provided the template for it.

Historians may never speak of an “Age of Adams” to rival Andrew Jackson, but Randall Woods’s new biography reveals the sixth president’s greatness.

Anthony Comstock, Victoria Woodhull, and what a battle from the 1870s means for 2024 and reproductive rights.

It was no coincidence that public school secularization and desegregation were happening, and failing, simultaneously.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. tried America First. This philosophy helped lead to World War II.

On July 2, 1881, less than a year after President James Garfield was elected the 20th president of the United States, he was shot by Charles Guiteau.

An expert on white nationalism explains how such demonizing rhetoric incubates and spreads—and what sets this particular episode apart.

Why did so many American Jewish women find Christian Science appealing?