Excerpts

My dad grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City. His story is a testament to how urban planning shapes countless lives.

The civil-rights mastermind was sidelined by his own movement. Now he’s back in the spotlight. What can we learn from his strategies of resistance?

A visit to the old neighborhood.

How cable TV transformed politics—and how politics transformed cable TV.

Inmates at this bucolic but brutal prison have long been singing the blues to sustain themselves, and a new compilation of gospel songs continues the legacy.

In the heart of New York City, a centuries-long hunt for Revolutionary War–era gold.

More than 3,800 formerly enslaved people are buried in the military cemetery.

Sylvia Mendez’s role in setting the stage for Brown v. Board of Education has been forgotten and overlooked.

The nineteenth-century establishment of mid-Atlantic coal mines and canals gave America its first taste of abundant fossil fuel energy.

In a century-long tradition, students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania came together in solidarity to combat illness among their members.

How the FBI's doomed attempt to stop criminal activity conducted via mobile phones shaped the regime of ubiquitous backdoor surveillance under which we live today.

The environmental crisis isn’t the result of the “tragedy of the commons.” It’s the result of the commons’ theft and privatization for profit.

A century ago, cars killed pedestrians and cyclists in record numbers. As traffic deaths rise again, it’s time to remember how US cities once responded to this safety crisis.

The famed economist’s “shareholder theory” provides corporations with too much room to violate consumers’ rights and trust.

The new UAW faces new challenges, but bears some distinct resemblances to the old.

The Supreme Court opened the door to challenges on school prayer, 60 years after a landmark ruling in Engel v. Vitale.

Modernization theory and the delusions of American strategy.

Rare footage of the woman magician's act captures her magnetic stage presence and range of tricks.

Meet these slippery, mischievous reflections of our anxieties about technology.

For decades, Americans have argued over the icon’s legacy. But his archives show that he had his own plans.

The new era of social consciousness and racial activism in the 1970s would play a pivotal role in the events leading up to the 71-day occupation.

A novel illuminates a moment of psychedelic history that has often been overlooked: the emergence of LSD psychotherapy just before the moral panic took hold.

Even as the world celebrates hip-hop turning 50, the debate over rap's birth date spins on.

The former pro wrestler says his surprise election as Minnesota governor paved the way for Donald Trump. Now he looks back “shamefully” on their past ties.

Even during the worst of war, the ring-shaped confections offered a bite of joy and a much-needed morale boost to weary soldiers during World War I.

Who were the Molly Maguires, what did they do, and why did they do it?

The nineteenth-century commitment to thrilling an audience embodied an emerging synergy of public performance, collective experience, and individual agency.

An understanding of the history of gunpowder might be able to tell us how and why guns have become so widely accessible in the present-day United States.

The American Ornithological Society says it will alter all human names of North American birds, starting with up to 80 species.

The government saw Red when looking at William Gropper's painting of the United States.

From European streets to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jews have been deeply involved in the history of coffee and the café scene.

Remembering Mother Cabrini's humanitarian work for Italian immigrants.

Louisa May Alcott is best known for Little Women, but she earned her first taste of celebrity as an essayist.

What explains the traditionalist Catholic infatuation with ‘The Exorcist’?

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares are prominent in Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

People hunted and raised small farms near the ruins of the ancient city.

Hunter-gatherer societies may have a bigger ecological impact than we thought.

Will Hermes's new biography, "Lou Reed: The King of New York," tries—and fails—to pin the rocker down.

A new book sorts through the fate of the leader of the fight for Congolese independence.

Did Ancestral Puebloans watch the skies from Mesa Verde's Sun Temple? Solving its mysteries requires overcoming archaeology’s troubled past.

Nostalgia, idealism, and the policing of childhood.

High up on the Colorado Plateau, in what is today the state of New Mexico, sit the remains of what was once a city of epic proportions.

In 1097, a Pueblo artist may have etched a rare celestial event into the rock for all of posterity

A new history dispenses with the sentimental lore and examines how Palo Alto has long been the seedbed for exploitation, chaos, and ecological degradation.

When Congo gained independence during the Cold War, secret U.S. actions undermined its young democracy. It’s time to make up for that.

Three-quarters of a century before artificial intelligence concerns, rapid advances in automation prompted panic about mass unemployment—and radical solutions.

A new book offers a critical history of Silicon Valley's blend of California idealism and exploitation.

What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone?

A talk with family, turpentine workers, historians, chefs, foresters, and beer brewers to get to the root of the rosin potato's origins.

The 1960 film was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its arrival in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt in Hollywood.