Excerpts

The U.S. sought to rebrand nuclear power as a source of peace, but this message helped mask a violent history.

How the alienated margins arrived at the center of American politics.

The editors of a new book talk about the history of the Indiana facility — written by people who were held there almost 150 years later.

Even if her husband was a murderer, a woman in a bad marriage once had few options. Unless she fled to South Dakota.

The relationship between two true believers in American exceptionalism.

A look into the life, art, and "wildness" of influential choreographer Martha Graham.

The university’s Peabody Museum exploited loopholes to prevent repatriation to the Wabanaki people while still staying in compliance with NAGPRA.

Did the 2010 Tea Party Movement really have anything in common with 1773? What did the history of populism suggest about the Tea Party's future?

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union was founded on the principle of interracial organizing.

What made those left-of-the-dial broadcasts so special during the 1980s, ‘90s and 2000s?

The Union general directly benefited from the brutal institution before and during the Civil War.

Cloning can help combat climate change.

Open container laws criminalize working-class people and make public life less fun. We need to legalize public drinking.

The schism isn't between TV viewers who love a show and those who hate it—it’s between those who love it in very different ways.

‘Off off the record’ with the man who secretly taped our telephone calls.

In its early days, Coca-Cola established key relationships in the supply chain ranging from natural resources to pharmaceuticals to achieve market dominance.

Sturmann Yanghis, a 17-year-old South African, was put on stage in America as a “wild savage.” Harvard claimed his remains when he died. Then they disappeared.

Many of the CIA analysts who spotted the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise were female. They had trouble getting their warnings heard.

The landscape for educational freedom is finally freed of 19th century prejudices, but other federal constitutional questions remain.

Henry Kissinger’s Vietnam diary shows that he knew the war was lost a decade before it ended.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives.

After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, was to be tried for treason. Does the debacle hold lessons for the trials awaiting Donald Trump?

On Dec. 2, 1948, evidence stashed in a hollowed-out pumpkin incriminated suspected Soviet spy Alger Hiss and boosted a young Richard Nixon’s political status.

Decisions about medical training and licensing in the 19th and early 20th century are still having an impact today.

You can call the United Daughters of the Confederacy a lot of things. But racist? Why, some of their best friends…

Lauded for his strategic insights, the former secretary of state is better remembered for his callousness toward the victims of global conflict.

Ronald Reagan's economic policies exacerbated the racial wealth gap— and they've guided all his successors.

For years, LBJ was reviled for Vietnam. Then the historical tables turned in his direction. But they turned a little too far.

Engineering put the Crescent City below sea level. Now, its future is at risk.

Preserved birds and digital photos help pinpoint levels of black carbon in the air and the changes that led to its decline.

Nationalization may seem like an alien idea in the hyper-capitalist United States. But the country has a long history of nationalizing all sorts of industries.

How the movies gave Los Angeles a zoo.

The polarizing dessert that people love to hate became a Christmas mainstay thanks, in part, to the U.S. Postal Service.

Fierce disagreements over Zionism have played out from the movement’s inception among Jews, including community leaders who worried it would spark antisemitism.

The “historian general” of the United Daughters of the Confederacy began the battle over the depiction of the South in history textbooks that continues today.

Unwinding the mortgage giants won't cure Americans of their desire to own a home, whether they can afford it or not.

In her thirty-two years as the keeper of Lime Rock Lighthouse, Ida Lewis challenged gender roles and became a national hero.

Lacking a sufficient support system, Meriwether Lewis did not have anyone close enough to help him.

"We have lost sight of some essential aspects of happiness that the founders clearly had in mind."

COVID-19 has recast the often-maligned restaurant drive-thru window as both a critical amenity and a basic comfort.

In the history of sexual dissent, the relationship between politics and sexual freedom defies simplistic categorization.

Originally built as barriers between fields and farms, the region’s abandoned farmstead walls have since become the binding threads of its cultural fabric.

On the early years of America's chronicler of the Great Plains.

Why do they exist? Where did they come from? Can they be defended? The most pressing questions, answered.

The Icarians thought they could build a paradise, but their project was marked by failure almost from the start.

A photographer excavates personal history through reconstruction of Adams's World War II photographs of Japanese Americans.

When we try to recover the “original meaning” of constitutional amendments, we begin with deeply engrained premises about the nature of what we're looking for.

When Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, her views on abortion became a source of intense speculation.

Did you drink the Kool-Aid? The phrase has become such a part of the vocabulary that for many its origins have been obscured.

A chilling raw feed of an infamous event.