Excerpts

Experts dug up 19th century newspaper clips revealing the real birthplace.

In "Memoirs of a Nobody," Henry Boernstein chronicles the militant immigrant organizing that helped keep St. Louis out of the hands of the Confederacy.

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

The nation’s founding myth was based on faith and solidarity – but it also contained the roots of today’s democratic crisis.

RFK’s call for “wellness farms” revives a grim legacy of forced labor, racial injustice, and eugenics disguised as mental health reform.

During the McCarthy era’s darkest days, public lands came under attack. History now repeats itself – and this may be the last chance to defend what’s ours.

Just because it's man-made doesn't mean it's not legitimate.

He challenged the violence of US power, abroad and at home. His radical internationalism, from Congo to Palestine, speaks to our moment.

Franklin Roosevelt warned that even in peacetime, America’s obligations to the world would continue.

Material history, including at places such as Nottoway, has messages for people studying Black history.

In 1986, black workers in apartheid South Africa walked off the job in support of New Jersey unionists; marking a rare moment of international labor solidarity.

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.

R. Crumb’s cartoons plumb the grotesque corners of the American unconscious.

A brief history of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Repelled by American racism, thousands of free people of color bounced between New Orleans and Haiti in the 19th century.

Scott Spillman reviews Seth Rockman’s “Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.”

The Iran-Contra affair exposed how government officials can ignore democratic norms and practices.

The film illustrates the near-impossibility of upward mobility during the segregation era.

Just down the road from Lexington and Concord, American patriots scurried to defend their immigrant neighbors.

Ultimately, only a civic culture alert to and upset by abuses of power can safeguard sound republican government.

During the Cold War, the government relied on universities for research, but also saw scholars as dangerous.

For two centuries, Karl Marx’s thoughts have significantly impacted US politics. In turn, his close study of the US informed the development of his ideas.

Since the earliest days of the Republic, American citizenship has been contested, subject to the anti-democratic impulses of racism, suspicion, and paranoia.

In 1965, the two intellectual giants squared off in a debate at Cambridge. It didn’t go quite as Buckley hoped.

The poignant images, at once banal and intimate, in the Lynch Family Photographs Collection contain mysteries perhaps only the public can solve.

On the robust influence of labor reform and antislavery ideas and movements on each other from the early National period to the Civil War.

On sanitized depictions of the 19th century, comfort shows, and income inequality.

In the 19th century, dyed ostrich feathers were haute couture, adorning the hats and boas of fashionistas on both sides of the Atlantic.

The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping their memories alive.

Dylan C. Penningroth challenges nearly every aspect of our traditional understanding of civil rights history.

Aimee Semple McPherson created a wildly popular personal brand as a preacher—then suddenly disappeared.

On the rise and fall of confession in American Catholicism, and what the demography of today's Catholics says about the future of the faith.

On the Second Red Scare and the lessons that it can provide for us today.

Sensitivity to the influence of BaKongo cosmology on Kongo Christianity can help us better understand the choices made by leaders of the rebellion.

Half a century ago the civil rights movement’s effort to carry the campaign for school desegregation from the South to the urban North ended in failure.

After the Civil War, conservatives used terrorism, cold-blooded murder, and economic coercion to fight the new state constitution in South Carolina.

John Scanlan’s “The Idea of Waste” argues that all civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear.

What the Constitution asks of us.

By assigning personal attributes to birth cohort, generationism tends to undermine personal responsibility.

We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.

His jurisprudence has been overshadowed by that of his showier colleagues but was a model of principled restraint.

The great American writer witnessed the forging of his nation – but Ron Chernow’s portrait cannot see beyond its subject.

Efforts to restrict immigration have long coexisted with — and even reinforced — the nation's economic reliance on Mexican laborers.

A graphic episode from "Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me."

The omissions in Trump's historical narratives reveal how he views national wealth: only the people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder matter.

We were warned.

Can the racialist and eugenicist roots of statistics can be cordoned off from “proper” science?

My dad’s birth certificate said Vicente. His passport said Vince. New legislation would have disenfranchised him.

After peaceful attempts at alliance-building stalled, the Continental Army launched an ill-fated invasion of Quebec in June 1775.

The past and present of counterfactual history, from antiquity to the Napoleonic Wars to a few very active subreddits.