Excerpts

How we rediscovered the tragedy in Mississippi that ushered us into the Great Migration.

The evolution of the right to privacy.

On the history of literature masquerading as primary source.

Whether you like Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert, Joe Rogan, or Sean Hannity, you're engaging the media world created by the late radio host.

How political figures have framed anti-LGBTQ bigotry as being pro-child and pro-parent.

The legendary actor left a mark in both film history and an industry fraught with self-regard.

A conversation with John David Waiheʻe III, former Governor of Hawai‘i, on the U.S. apology to the Hawaiian people.

The dumping of tons of tea in protest set the stage for the American Revolution and was a window on the culture and attitudes of the time.

The carcinogenic effects of asbestos have been known for decades. We should have banned it long ago.

On how the fringe ideas of a set of American neoliberals became a new and pervasive way of life.

Advertising went from being an embarrassing activity to a legitimate part of every company’s business plans—despite scant evidence that it worked.

Paul Cuffe was the first Black American to formally meet with a sitting president at the White House.

It wasn’t really Jews or Palestinians. It was the U.S. Congress, which closed American borders 100 years ago this month.

A century after three Tejano men were shot to death, the story their family tells is different than the official account. Whose story counts as Texas history?

“John Marshall...exhibited a subservience to the executive branch that continues to haunt us.”

The black naturalist, astronomer, surveyor, and almanac-writer Benjamin Banneker took issue with Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward “those of my complexion.”

And cost Gerald Ford the presidency.

A second-generation immigrant, Hazel Ying Lee was the first Chinese American woman to receive her pilot's license.

For more than a century, school nurses have improved public health in schools and beyond.

Executive power and the Constitution.

Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built.

When viewing federal authority as a bulwark for civil rights against local tyranny, we miss what the U.S. government has done to sustain white freedom.

The rhetorically modest but functionally powerful ruling that ended segregation shouldn’t be misused to forestall other efforts at racial equality.

They called themselves the Wide Awakes. They are a lesson in building a political movement.

Henry James, spiritualism, and the afterlife.

The legal academy has grown dismissive of Justice O’Connor, but the Supreme Court is not a law school faculty workshop. She saw herself as a problem-solver.

The evolution of women's sportswear.

From Dow to now.

Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.

Revisiting the AAUP's 1971 UCLA investigation.

Professional nurses who moved north during the Great Migration worked in New York City’s most contagious sanatorium — and changed the course of public health.

Sinclair Lewis and the small-town science of yearning.

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit.

100 years ago the U.S. tried to limit immigration to White Europeans. Instead, diversity triumphed.

In Beth Linker’s new book, she applies a disability studies lens to the history of posture.

Archaeologists help modern descendants of Chinese railroad workers in Utah commemorate their ancestors' labor and lives.

The story of an incident that may have been the first time the issue of race was ever addressed on a baseball field in the Carolinas.

On the continuing regime of racial terror in the post-Civil War American South.

They’re invested in legal education, creating an originalist industrial complex with outsize influence.

Spiritualists believed that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey and help those on Earth create a more just world.

On the hostess Langston Hughes called the “Joy Goddess of Harlem.”

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.

Reconsidering Earl Warren's place in U.S. history.

The newly empowered federal state created during Reconstruction could restrict immigration much more comprehensively than any state—as Chinese laborers soon discovered.

Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors.

Marty Peretz and the travails of American liberalism.

Meir Kahane's legacy in Israel and America.

Why our understanding of the era has been hindered by the party system model.

A new career-spanning book offers a portrait of Painter’s career as a historian, essayist, and most recently visual artist.

Swarns’s book about a sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is the legacy of resistance.