Excerpts

How a tragedy in New York City convinced Americans to learn how to swim.

Humans have doodled for as long as they have written and drawn, but psychoanalysis began to imagine the doodle as a key to understanding the unconscious mind.

The D-Day landings turned the tide of the war, but their success rested on the uncertain calculations of Allied meteorologists.

On defying gender norms and expectations in extreme sports.

Questions linger about the assault on Fort Wagner, which took place on this day in 1863.

Joe Biden is hardly the first president who has decided not to seek a second term—but the circumstances this time are unique.

Lyndsey Stonebridge’s book hurls us deeper into Hannah Arendt’s thinking, showing us that there was muddle rather than method at the heart of it.

What happened to privacy when Americans gained easy access to cameras in the Gilded Age?

The erased histories of the communities that built Seattle.

The essay component of American college applications has a long history, but its purpose has changed over time.

A wetland restoration project is bringing hope to Maui residents who want to honor Lahaina’s history and return water to the town after last year’s fires.

Sinha enlarges the temporal boundaries students are accustomed to by covering the end of the 19th century into the Progressive era with the 19th Amendment.

An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor is long overdue.

Long before Google Maps, an intrepid inventor with three camera-equipped biplanes captured a groundbreaking view of Gotham in its Jazz Age glory.

The grueling, relentless simulations astronauts that prepared the astronauts for quick decision-making in space.

On the life and times of Jason Epstein, cofounder of “The New York Review of Books.”

On the profound impact of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" on Noam Chomsky's early embrace of left-libertarian and anarchist ideologies.

When police raided Columbia University in May, commentators drew parallels to the 1968. But the school’s hostility to the antiwar movement traces back to 1917.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F spends its final moments on a thrilling cinematic trope of the ’80s, one that I would argue is due for a comeback.

Sean O’Brien’s speech at the RNC may represent a return to nonpartisan realpolitik for unions. But does that reflect labor's strength or its decline?

High ideals have always gone together with economic self-interest in the history of the United States.

Before last weekend’s attack on Donald Trump, would-be assassins targeted Ronald Reagan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and seven other presidents or candidates.

But they also find key differences.

A new book explores the history of presidents who abused their constitutional power and the citizen movements that stopped them.

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today.

Japanese were interested when Oppenheimer visited Japan as an honored guest in 1960. Will they be also interested in the Nolan film released today in Japan?

Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.

BMI is a simple calculation, but how it is translated into a diagnosis is complex and flawed.

Cataloguing basement fallout shelters in the summer of 1967.

For generations of American radicals, the path to liberation required a new constitution, not forced removal.

How Europe reacted when Ethiopia tried to join the famed global sporting tradition at the 1924 Paris Olympics.

An island eroding into the bay offers tantalizing clues about when and how humans first made their way into North America.

The story of American abolitionists who, after Emancipation, pivoted from antislavery campaigns to animal welfare advocacy.

Herders carved names, slogans, nude silhouettes and more into the trees around them. Now, researchers rush to find the arborglyphs before they disappear.

With over 100 lawsuits dismissed, a last-ditch effort is underway to force the city to put into legal record what happened after that day.

In a momentous couple of years, the young United States added more than a million square miles of territory, including Texas and California. 

On three histories of the Biden White House, and the 2024 election.

The moral terrain of crowdfunding is fueled by two persistent social ideologies: the dual, and intertwined, myths of meritocracy and the “deserving poor.”

The West Florida revolt in the Age of Revolutions.

The failed assassination of Donald Trump might not have any lasting effect on the election or politics in general.

On the meaning and use of rivers and other waterways.

For a brief moment in history, Frances Thompson was Memphis’ biggest scandal. Her life paints a different picture of our civil rights legacy.

Anti-Asian immigration restrictions led male Punjabi farm workers in California to marry Mexican and Mexican American women, creating new cultural bonds.

Even as the primary targets of immigration restrictionism have shifted, the consequences for immigrants remain profoundly shaped by the system created in 1924.

Despite an unwelcoming political climate and a dearth of LGBTQ+ protections, LGBTQ+ Southerners have persisted.

The histories of the U.S. and Czechia are linked by multiple presidents of both countries.

During the 1984 campaign, the 73-year-old president meandered his way through his face-off against Walter Mondale, prompting questions about his mental acuity.

People who study the past don’t always have special insight into politics. Recent events have made that crystal clear.

70 years since President Árbenz was ousted for standing up to Chiquita, the firm might finally be held to account for its ties to a far-right paramilitary group in Colombia.

Finding a story in the ways Robert Ray Hamilton, John Dudley Sargent, and Edith Sargent weren’t quite forgotten.