Excerpts

Fifty-five years ago, a congressman made a single addition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that changed everything.

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.

New information on Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man who would turn escape into an art form.

A project to bring to light the stories of these victims’ lives and to highlight the patterns of racial terror perpetrated across the Northeast and Midwest.

From civil rights marches to moonwalks, historical imagery that belongs to everyone is locked away behind paywalls. Why?

A historian attends the 250th anniversary of the Tea Party, and reflects on the ways Americans remember one of the Revolution's main set pieces.

Denied burial alongside Union soldiers killed during the Battle of Gettysburg, the 30 or so men were instead buried in the all-Black Lincoln Cemetery.

Born out of the Great Depression, the genre reminds us that even in hard times there's laughter, love, and light.

Was he a brilliant painter or a brilliant brand?

Textbook watchdogs Mel and Norma Gabler are good, sincere, dedicated people, who just may be destroying your child’s education.

America has rarely treated all people with HIV equally.

Clouds and conspiracies.

Attribution can make visible the vast infrastructure of research and display how much hard-won knowledge, including creative endeavor, it has faciliated.

A civil rights initiative during World War II known as the Double V campaign advocated for dual victories: over fascism abroad, and racial injustice in the U.S.

What does Hermann’s watchful position over New Ulm—stolen Dakota homelands— reveal about settler colonialism and the geography of memory?

It has been an article of faith that Jews and Black Americans have a natural bond, but a ‘Black-Jewish alliance’ is not, or at least not reliably, a thing.

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

As more Black men gained the right to vote in New York, the state began to change its laws to reduce their power or disenfranchise them completely.

Mario Van Peebles' "Outlaw Posse" is the latest attempt to correct the erasure of people of color from the classic cinema genre.

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.

It is worth taking a moment to recover the genealogy for the "crosshairs," the universal modern index of imminent violent killing.

The rich history of Japanese-language literature challenges assumptions about what counts as U.S. art.

Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the vote has a familiar ring. It evokes an egregious example of election fraud in the 1890s.

City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.

Beginning in 1905, one star-studded song-publishing company would push the aesthetic limits of how Black popular music was shown to the public.

Space and place in New York City's responses to the French Revolution.

Until the Civil War, regulating immigration to the US was left to individual states. That changed with Emancipation and the legal end of slavery.

A review of three new studies about how race and class intersect.

The venerable movie studio once defined the industry's zeal for consolidation, pioneering vertical integration and serving as the model for its major rivals.

Over a weekend in 1995, a small group gathered in Ohio to unleash the power of the internet by making it navigable.

Steven Spielberg’s early films conjure all of his moviemaking magic to repair a world of lost dads.

A measure almost made the Republican Party’s 2024 Texas primary ballot to measure whether party members would support secession from the United States.

A summary of how white migration out of the postbellum South entrenched Confederate culture across the U.S. during postwar reconciliation.

Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives.

The long history of sampling in music, and a new tool that lets artists sample without fear of copyright claims.

The ragtime composer's life, career, and resurrection.

The neglected history of Black mapmaking in America and the creative ways in which Black people have historically used mapping to tell stories.

Boston has more "made" land than any other American city.

How a 1960s interspecies communication experiment went haywire.

The untold story of the double agent who attacked the paper from within.

A look at racism in movie-making.

Building the Panama Canal.

In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments about the rule, but Congress originally intended to prioritize public health.

Before being pushed aside by the NCAA, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women governed women’s college athletics.

America’s favorite gun.

In the 1970s and early ’80s, NYC’s racially and ethnically diverse working-class neighborhoods nurtured groundbreaking rap, salsa, and punk music.

Again and again, a fervant British anticommunist's filmstrip of the novel shows images of women in states of distress.

The bicycle is a symbol of youth, but in the mid-twentieth century it also symbolized Black joy and mobility.

New laws regarding transgender youth are based on the assumption that the gender binary is natural.