Excerpts

How family political dynasties in America came to be.

J. Edgar Hoover’s ascent within the FBI reveals the birth of an unprecedented surveillance apparatus that would survey US citizens for decades to come.

The complicated and visceral issue of how we preserve our history offers an opportunity for meaningful discourse.

How Black support for Zionism morphed into support for Palestine.

Innovators are using digital tools to tell stories of the city’s Black and Latinx history.

Martin Scorsese's new film revisits the murders of wealthy Osages in Oklahoma in the 1920s

Despite depictions of the Underground Railroad, escaping over land was almost impossible in the South. Thousands of enslaved people found allies on the water.

How the law became a staging ground for unrestrained war.

The rise and rise and rise of data.

You can't be neutral on a tour bus rolling toward the foot of Masada.

The early republic and the seventh planet.

The American Museum of Natural History holds 12,000 bodies — but they don’t want you to know whose.

Exclusive interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and a long-buried memo reveal new details about one of the 20th century's biggest scoops.

Conservative curricula are being pushed into tax-funded history classrooms.

From Bill Buckley to our 24/7 media circus.

During the New Deal, mass left movements and government funding spawned a boomlet in working-class art. For once, art wasn’t just the province of the rich.

Black prosperity has provoked white resentment that has led to the undoing of policies that have nurtured Black advancement.

Cliff Sloan’s new book explains how the Franklin Roosevelt-shaped Court wrestled with individual rights as the nation fought to save itself and the world.

A new book on the Clinton presidency reveals how it abandoned a progressive vision for a finance-led agenda for economics and geopolitics.

Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America's haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.

The ongoing UAW strike is reminiscent of early UAW leader Walter Reuther — before the union and Reuther himself downsized their ambitions.

Amid Reagan’s late-sixties crackdown on the California counterculture, a jury was tasked with deciding whether Lenore Kandel’s psychedelic sex poems had “redeeming social importance.”

From the outset of the American Revolution, a lingering problem that plagued the minds of the Continental Congress dealt with its financing.

A new biography of Edith Hamilton tells the story of how and why ancient literature became widely read in the United States.

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

True Crime is having a renaissance with popular TV series and podcasts. But the history of the genre dates back much further.

From homesteaders to tourists to the U.S. Army, railroads flooded the Great Plains with people who saw bison as pests, amusements, or opportunities for profit.

Who owns the past? That is the subject of debate after the discovery of a human skeleton on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington.

The great short story writer and poet wrote many a book review.

How Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's activism set the stage for Lebron James and twenty-first century Black professional athletes.

Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose is the latest example of the struggles around Jewish representation on the stage and screen.

A former park ranger is on the hunt to complete a collection of posters by artists commissioned by the government celebrating national parks.

How English words evolved on a foreign continent.

How American Indians in Hollywood have gone from stereotypes to starring roles.

Life as a Signal Corps weatherman was dangerous: besides inclement weather, they faced labor riots, conflicts with Native Americans, yellow fever outbreaks, fires, and more.

The history and legacy of a beautiful project to record thousands of new fruit varieties.

A new biography of the Velvet Underground founder, Lou Reed, considers the stark duality of the man and his music.

‘Time Warp’ all the way back to the 1800s.

There's no clear system in place to repatriate remains of captive Africans or objects associated with them.

New dating methods have added more evidence that these fossils date to 23,000 years ago, pushing back migration to the Americas by thousands of years.

Canada's politicians accidentally honored a Nazi immigrant. The U.S. has frequently done the same.

A feminist perspective on the first and only female prime minister of Israel.

Literature is key to a healthy democracy, but schools are leaving books behind.

The archives of the historically Black Tuskegee University recently released recordings from 1957 to 1971, with a number by powerful civil rights leaders.

It was a year that showcased the audacious talent in Hollywood experimenting with darker themes and new film techniques.

The Spiro Agnew Edition.

Kevin Phillips help set the Republican Party on the path that led it to Trump.

The long, strange, history of the baseball cap.

The comparison between last weekend's Hamas attack and 9/11 is apt.

W.E.B. Du Bois’ message to African American artists.