Excerpts

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.

A museum dedicated to techno music has opened in Frankfurt, Germany, and many genre pioneers feel that Black and queer artists in Detroit have been overlooked.

The American foreign policy sage was driven as much by pessimism about the US as antipathy to the Soviet Union.

The secret history of a psychoanalytic cult.

Debates about handling Confederates reveal that the 14th Amendment bars unrepentant insurrectionists from office.

Government shutdowns only became possible in 1980, when the Attorney General offered a new interpretation of an 1870 law.

The anthropologist helped popularize both techno-optimism and the concept of existential risk.

Why is surfing still stuck in the 1960s when women have always done it?

The proportional representation (PR) vs. single transferable vote (STV) battle in local elections.

The relatively unknown Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana has been elevated to the powerful position of Speaker of the House.

A recent biography of Vince McMahon presents him as an entertainment tycoon who changed culture and politics. The real story is as banal as it is brutal.

Greenbelt was designed in 1935 as a community created, built, populated and even furnished entirely by the federal government. Now the FBI is set to move in.

A new documentary, “Billion Dollar Babies,” shows how a product of Appalachian folk art drew the blueprint for all holiday toy crazes to come.

Paul Landis, 88, is one of the few survivors who had a firsthand view of Kennedy’s assassination 60 years ago Wednesday. He is only now telling his whole story.

How concern about injuries is changing sports.

An Indigenous sacred site, Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks has served as a military barracks, a fairground and, more recently, a golf course.

It was J. Edgar Hoover who did more than any fire-breathing churchman to turn fearful white suburbanites into the crusaders of a renewed conservative backlash.

In a technological age, impassioned devotees renew an ancient maritime tradition.

The Chicago Boys and the tragedy of the Chilean coup.

A pop star’s road map to decadence.

Two new books attempt to grasp Thoreau’s seeming contradictions without reconciling them too easily.

Slips of paper with peculiar regional terms crossed the Atlantic to Oxford and into the pages of a 70-year lexicographical project.

And the grandmother who wouldn’t let him get away with it.

The Chicago school ruled supreme over economics—until recently.

Long before Greenland’s shifting ice threatened sea level rise, it doomed one of the military’s most audacious Cold War projects.

In 1866, the famous abolitionist laid out his vision for radically reshaping America in the pages of "The Atlantic."

A president’s infamous protestation 50 years ago during Watergate relied on an Old Norse term for things that take a turn.

“I’d assumed this practice was a manifestation of military decorum.”

Historian Ned Blackhawk’s new book stresses the importance of telling US history with a wider and more inclusive lens.

Making sense of anti-Semitism today requires examining Henry Ford’s outsize part in its origins.

Barely-disguised hostilities sometimes belied the rebels’ declared identity as the United States of America.

Government, wrote Alexander Hamilton, should substitute “the mild influence” of the law for “the violent and sanguinary agency of the sword.”

No, roving bands of medieval Scandinavians did not visit West Virginia. (So far as we know.)

In 1871, the Fisk University singers embarked on a tour that introduced white Americans to a Black sound that would reshape the nation.

Freedpeople and their advocates persuaded the nation to embrace schooling for all.

From Jefferson's viewpoint, Native peoples could claim a title to their homelands, but they did not own that land as private property.

James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?

“Gun Country” chronicles the transformation of guns from tangible weapons to ideological ammunition during the Cold War.

This simple technology changed the world.

Buckley’s seldom-acknowledged fluency in Spanish shaped his worldview—including his admiration for dictators from Spain to Chile and beyond.

Native minstrelsy and the American summer camp movement.

Revelations about secret government programs after Kennedy’s assassination increased the power of conspiracy theories.

A 1974 case gave the antiabortion movement a new playbook to whittle away abortion rights for poor women.

A treaty commitment to seat a delegate representing the Cherokee Nation in the House has gone unmet for two centuries.

A new book's insistence that the bomb was necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender is largely contradicted by its own evidence.

In 1840, William Henry Harrison was mocked for his presidential run at age 67 — 15 years younger than President Biden would be at the start of a second term.

No one should fear a history that asks a country to live up to its highest ideals.

Justifying civilian casualties has a long history.

He was one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved stars. Then his adopted country turned against him.