Excerpts

Kevin Cook and Jeff Guinn on David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and the 1993 siege of Waco.

Romano’s book is a vital, comprehensive piece of media scholarship about one of the most influential outlets of the last century. It’s also fun as hell to read.

Organizing is a kind of alchemy: it turns alienation into connection, despair into dedication, and oppression into strength.

A UC Berkeley student’s award-winning research shines a light on LGBTQ+ life in Japanese American concentration camps during World War II.

A cartoon report on the only policy proven to address the housing shortage and how racism, inept management, and disinvestment led to long-term decline.

136 books that made America think.

Age of Revolutions was happy to interview Nathan Perl-Rosenthal about his new book, entitled 'The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It.'

A new series dramatizes Edwin Stanton's hunt for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators in the aftermath of the president’s 1865 assassination.

An effort is underway to restore President Wilson’s reputation as a great reformer. His best reforms were won by a mass movement, often pushing against Wilson.

Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.

The Duke Center for Firearms Law's efforts to catalog the history of gun laws.

Putting massive amounts of time in perspective is incredibly hard for humans, so we made this graphic.

The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.

The Kerner Commission was credited with exposing systemic racism that inspired resistance in Black communities. James Baldwin argued that it stated the obvious.

The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time.

Maria P. Williams pioneered filmmaking for African American women, but her life is even more thrilling than her sole film.

The real Andrew Johnson compared with the only film made about his life.

A rift in thinking about who should control powerful new technologies sent the brothers on diverging paths.

The history of grassroots banking politics has been overlooked — and even denied.

A documentary that follows the writer’s late-in-life journey to the South chronicles his vision for Black politics in a post–Civil Rights era world.

Who was buried in the lonely grave in New York’s potter’s field? The year-long search led to a lost world in the history of AIDS.

Congress’s periodic battles over the Farm Bill often pass unnoticed, but the document effectively determines what, how, and how much we eat.

Disappearing foods – and why they need protecting.

The turbulent history of an often forgotten moment that would leave blood in the streets and shape the modern landscape of Chicago.

Common in colonial New England, bundling allowed a suitor to spend a night in bed with his sweetheart—while her parents slept in the next room.

Matthew Lassiter’s history plays out in ranch houses, high school parking lots, and courtrooms from Shaker Heights to Westchester to Orange County.

While the concept stretches back centuries, it has garnered significant attention in recent decades.

The inventor of the atomic bomb, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s new film, was the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism.

A new television miniseries depicts the pursuit of Lincoln’s killer. But the public appetite for tales about the chase began even as it was happening.

Born into slavery, this preacher and Underground Railroad conductor served as the inspiration for a history-making book.

Right from the beginning, a commercial spirit and the wealth it generated were essential to creating and constituting America.

A look into neocolonialism in modern America.

But it didn’t work out for their parties.

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.