Excerpts

The internet has expanded how we understand the possibilities of the trans experience.

In a recent Supreme Court oral argument about disarming domestic abusers, originalism itself was put to the test.

For decades, Kissinger kept the great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward.

A new film finally spotlights Bayard Rustin, the gay civil rights activist who organized the 1963 March on Washington.

The strange and contradicting development of the liberal version of egalitarianism.

How corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.

As the United States prepared to enter World War I, the government created the first modern state propaganda office, the Committee on Public Information.

Modern surveillance policing is rooted in approaches adopted a century ago.

In every generation, writers and readers find new ways to plumb the depths of Herman Melville and his work.

Sanitation reformers confront a neighborhood seemingly immune to state intervention.

Until about 100 years ago, grasses up to two feet high blanketed swaths of the Sonoran Desert.

The history of garbage dumps is the history of America.

Reenactments of the frontier west, complete with cowboy shootouts on main streets, reproduce a narrative of history that is widely accepted by millions.

Understanding history can help us understand what will be necessary if we’re serious about finally having a more diverse, less exclusionary publishing industry.

A discussion on the difficulty of keeping faith in a foundationally anti-Black republic.

The back-and-forth life of Confederate James Longstreet.

Natchez, Miss., is beginning to highlight the history of its enslaved people—including at a Black-owned bed and breakfast in former slave quarters.

Asbestos was a miracle material, virtually impervious to fire. But as we fixed city fires in other ways, we came to learn about its horrific downsides.

The radical art of the Depression years.

Wherever we find the state engaged in potentially lethal repression, we find prison.

James Monroe’s 1817 goodwill tour kicked off a decade of party-less government – but he couldn’t stop the nation from dividing again.

Carl Skoglund's early life as a militant worker in Sweden prepared him for leadership in the 1934 Teamster Strikes.

The woman with the pen name Onoto Watanna had a stunningly productive literary career as a cookbook writer, novelist, and screenwriter.

The U.S. divided into Pacific, Atlantic, Interior and Confederate States.

A survey of the New Orleans paper from 1837 to 1914 shows reporters and editors frequent used the racial slur to trivialize Black people in news and commentary.

When George Horace Lorimer took over as editor of the Saturday Evening Post, America was a patchwork of communities. There was no sense of nation or unity.

In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England Puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board.

To most of the world, “corn” is “maize,” a word that comes from the Taíno mahizwas. Not for British colonists in North America, though.

On the 14th amendment – and if it might stop Trump.

Experts have warned that utterly realistic A.I.-generated videos might wreak havoc through deception. What’s happened is troubling in a different way.

Bill Erquitt was an unforgettable character among Georgia’s many Civil War enthusiasts. After he died, his secrets came to light.

Blaming corrupt individuals rather than federal Indian policy for the violence and exploitation perpetrated against the Osage Nation misses the mark.

On the performance of authenticity and the native stories left to tell.

We reach for the term when we want to condemn the worst crimes, but the UN’s Genocide Convention excuses more perpetrators of mass murder than it condemns.

Maintaining the internet data of dead people.

One hundred years ago, a crisis in urban masculinity created the lumberjack aesthetic. Now it's making a comeback.

Other emigrants such as Wolfe Tone did not compromise their principles in unfamiliar environments.

On revelations from a chance graveside encounter.

In Depression-era San Antonio, polarized portraits of Mexicans appealed to the biases of readers.

The newspaper standby still rivets our attention a century later.

The device was part of an elaborate plan on behalf of Union Pacific to boost passenger rail travel in the American West.

How America's failures in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis of the 1970s hurt U.S. security and contributed to the current war.

As our faith in the future plummets and the present blends with the past, we feel certain that we’ve reached the point where history has fallen apart.

Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants to "make hard work cool again." He isn’t the first.

The artist and his birds continue to challenge us.

The young black men served a combined total of 130 years for a crime they never committed.

The site offers rare evidence of interactions between de Soto and Indigenous people.

Georgia’s competitive runoff election is the result of centuries of white supremacist efforts.

Labeled a local eccentric, millionaire James Eads How used his inherited wealth to support vagrant communities.

The UVA president’s commissions on Slavery and on the University in the Age of Segregation were established to find and tell the stories of a painful past.