Excerpts

A Barthesian bristle and the curious power of Walt Whitman’s posthumous eyelids.

A front-row seat to a slow-moving catastrophe. How tech both helps and hurts our world.

No, castoreum is not a cheap substitute for strawberries; it’s luxe, artisanal secretions from a beaver's rear end.

What the debate about the Arctic Refuge tells us about science denialism.

Belknap’s downfall was his decision to abuse his authority to appoint “sutlers” or civilian merchants who ran trading posts that served military outposts.

A Hungarian immigrant first brought the soccer style field kick to the NFL.

San Francisco 49ers fans may feel like their team name is less racist than the “Chiefs,” but given the history of the Gold Rush, they shouldn’t be so smug.

NIMBYs were citizen activists who set a model for participatory democracy that YIMBYs should follow.

Kate Mullany's former home in Troy, New York honors one of the earliest women's labor unions that sought fair pay and safe working conditions.

Journalist Rachel Nolan investigates tens of thousands of forced adoptions and the U.S. policy that enabled them.

US intelligence agencies seem to have adopted Orwell’s idea of doublethink—“to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.”

A literary examination of Henry David Thoreau's life and legacy today.

After over a century, the unelected mascot of St. Louis is finally losing its place in public life.

When the Pentagon wanted a photographer to record the largest airborne assault in the Vietnam War, the most qualified candidate was a young French woman.

Before its subversion in the Jim Crow era, the fruit symbolized black self-sufficiency.

What did Truman and Oppenheimer actually say in that room?

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.

Many of the ­private colleges and universities in the US arose as much out of vanity as necessity. But for morbid narcissism, nothing comes close to Stanford.

Comparing the struggles of Mexican and Greek immigrants to the United States.

Before the first disposable sanitary napkin hit the mass market, periods were thought of in a much different way.

The mistress of JFK, there was a lot more than wealth, whiteness, and femininity to make Mary Pinchot Meyer a target of murder.

How race-based legacies of disinvestment initiated by New Deal Era redlining regimes were followed by decades of over-policing at the scale of the neighborhood.

Two gifted sisters in Philadelphia helped to transform early American science.

In the fight over keeping Trump’s name on the ballot, the 2000 decision is a warning but not a precedent.

The Czech composer came to New York with the conviction that African-American melodies would be the ‘seedbed’ for their nation’s 20th-century music.

The music that grew out of Durham's tobacco manufacturing plants influenced some of the most widely recorded musicians of the last 65 years—and still does.

On the folly of relying on history to settle the debate over whether the Fourteenth Amendment should bar Trump from office.

Earl Tupper invented the container's seal, but it was a savvy, convention-defying entrepreneur who got the product line into the homes of housewives.

Activists are often held up as exemplars of personal morality — but in every social struggle, ordinary people with complex lives rise up as leaders.

The transformation of Alabama politics in the 1960s and 1970s reflected the rise of a new version of Republicanism that Trump has perfected.

The invasion is still the most important foreign policy decision by a 21st century U.S. president, so the surfeit of analysis should surprise no one.

“Hendrix used a range of technological innovations...to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.”

The New York Times’ series on slavery relies on bad scholarship to make an argument with an inauspicious history.

Writing under ancient veneers allowed partisans to politicize and weaponize ancient history during the turbulent start of the Federal Republic.

Leila Philip's book is thrilling, both on scientific and historical levels.

Economists and historians have been telling us the wrong story about Continental currency for two centuries.

Perhaps, in ethical terms, it doesn’t matter whether overhunting was or was not the cause of the passenger pigeon’s extinction. Practically speaking, it matters a good deal.

What happened when a diplomat teamed up with Sigmund Freud to analyse the president?

In 1950s America, the Cold War was raging, but socialists were playing key roles in the early civil rights movement.

A Green Mountain Boy's controversial death and its consequences.

A collection of previously unpublished stories offers a portrait of the playwright as a young artist.

In 1967, Milton Friedman launched a counterrevolution in economics that overturned the Keynesian theory of inflation.

My research shows that this tradition runs deep.

In the 1940s, the Irgun went to the heart of American culture to garner support for its campaign of violent insurrection.

Hot pants served as a sartorial riposte to the fashion industry’s relentless campaign for the midi.

An interview with Jennifer Burns on her authoritative new biography of the American economist and the personal and intellectual origins of his theories.

One woman’s crusade for democratic participation and political efficacy in the face of powerful institutions.

During the interwar years, the American journalist reported on political unrest in Cuba, Germany and Spain.

The story of the Little Longfellow War.

Her athletic performance in New York impressed onlookers of all colors and cracked opened the door for a new generation of Black players to come.