Excerpts

A scene of conflict that was lost to the ages has been unearthed, assembling an indigenous perspective on events at the very root of America’s founding.

The yuppies embodied the winning side of America’s deepening economic divide. Bruce Springsteen spoke for those left behind.

A new book tells the story of American communism as an integral part of 20th-century US history, with Communists “as social critics and social change agents.”

Americans are seized by conspiracy theories, and as a result, democracy is in peril—so conventional wisdom holds.

On Nelson Rockefeller and the disappearance of moderate Republicans from American politics.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s tacit support for a program that jailed sex workers suggests the limits of the elite-led reform efforts she championed.

For as long as universities have existed, academics have struggled to impart their knowledge to students. The failing is fixable—if Washington demands it.

In the early 19th century, US elites demonized the self-liberated slaves of the Haitian Revolution as dangerous practitioners of barbaric rituals.

Many founders expressed their hope that slavery would be abolished, while simultaneously exerting themselves to defend it.

What the three-fifths clause meant at ratification.

"They’re eating the pets of the people that live there," former President Trump claimed — with no basis — at the first presidential debate.

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest.

The Power Broker leaves us ill-equipped to understand or confront the struggles that face the city today.

Trump’s baseless claims about migrants in Ohio reflect a long history of prejudice against Haitians. In Washington, those falsehoods have driven policy.

A culture of reverence for the U.S. Constitution shields the founding document from criticism, despite its many shortcomings.

The beloved family show left a lasting legacy.

Segregated lives of pride and peril on Firestone's Liberian plantations.

The former president’s grotesque demagoguery is just the latest in a long line of vicious attacks on residents and immigrants from the island nation.

How an American arms dealer and a surplus of guns in Europe after World War II popularized gun ownership.

The candidate's potential ties to an Irish slave owner invite us to reexamine Ireland’s multilayered historical identity.

For the English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.

Charles Ives and the visual.

Civic thought and leadership institutes will thrive if they promote strong scholarship and courses in traditional fields the mainstream academy slights.

Fazlur Khan and the idea that would turn architecture on its head.

Charles Ives and the Civil War.

But unlike today's white Christian nationalism, Black church leaders called for healing internal divisions through engagement.

A new book blames institutional Protestantism for undermining a vibrant strain of Christian radicalism that swirled through the Gilded Age.

Children’s stories set on the coast suggest a wilder way of life.

A controversial historical claim grounds MAGA evangelicalism's embrace of the "Appeal to Heaven" flag.

President Ford’s pardon of Nixon is seen as a damaging precedent establishing presidential impunity. Now, the Supreme Court has affirmed that impunity.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s book can guide us through turbulent conversations about revolution, social change, and the founding of America.

To capture the spirit of the poet Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs decided to break all the rules.

On the early history of New York City's northernmost borough.

Russia has been peddling influence for a long time, using a playbook that it still uses today.

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.

Julius Rosenwald understood that charity is not just about giving, but about fixing the inequalities that make giving necessary.

Twenty-five years ago, protesters shut down the meeting of the World Trade Organization. At the time, it seemed very important. But is it now?

It's a great story. The only problem is that the whole thing is probably made up.

In 1916, an unlikely duo exposed political corruption in Indiana, setting a new precedent for fair voting across the country.

The white pines of New England may have done more than any leaf of tea to kick off the American Revolution.

Anti-Trump Republicans revere Ronald Reagan as Trump’s opposite—yet in critical ways Reagan may have been his forerunner.

Demography has not managed to be destiny in the past half-century—but predictions of a millenarian shift have not lost their appeal.

Richard Beck’s “Homeland” traces the far-reaching aftereffects of the attacks and tries to recover the events of the day, as they happened.

A new book on how 9/11 altered the national psyche also demonstrates how it stunted progressive politics.

On the independence of the Muscogee Nation.

How a subgenre of murder mysteries plays with the way real history is written.

This large database of possible American war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan shows that the military-justice system rarely punishes perpetrators.

An anti-Vietnam protest that resulted in the Supreme Court confirming that students are persons under the constitution.

America long ago rejected the trappings of monarchy in favor of republicanism, but many have wanted to have it both ways.

There’s hagiography, then there’s...whatever this is.