Excerpts

Early 20th century National Park Service Rangers were a notoriously rough-and-tumble lot.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Siege of Wounded Knee, the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee by American Indian Movement (AIM) activists.

A small band of Modoc warriors held off hundreds of U.S. soldiers in California. Ultimately, the conflict left the Modoc leaders dead and the tribe divided.

As world leaders scramble to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from escalating, it is often forgotten just how close the Yom Kippur War came to all-out nuclear war.

On Oct. 11, 1988, at the height of the AIDS crisis and a wave of homophobia, people were asked to take a daring step by declaring publicly that they were gay.

On the drive-in movie culture that captured a yearning for fast cars on dusty roads.

How Eugene V. Debs turned American republicanism against the chiefs of capitalism – and became a true crusader for freedom.

More than an artful calligrapher, John Hancock forswore the austerity of his fellow Bostonians, and their extremism.

“You know how many second basemen or shortstops I knocked on their ass in my career?”

15th century dogma connects the genocide and land dispossession of Native Americans with the enslavement and oppression of African Americans throughout history.

50 years after native inhabitants of the Chagos Islands were forced out to make room for a military base, a Chagossian leader came to D.C. seeking reparations.

Coke knew their plastic would trash the planet…and did it anyway.

RJ Smith’s biography of Chuck Berry examines his subject’s instinct for crossing the line musically, racially, and morally.

Suspected of orchestrating the Lincoln assassination, the South’s most prominent Jew escaped to London to start a new life as a high-powered lawyer.

The self-confidence that kept Columbus going was his undoing.

A new book links the rise of American prisons to the expansion of American power around the globe.

Over a century after one of New York City’s deadliest industrial accidents, the names of its victims, most of them women, are being enshrined in steel.

Alexander Hamilton always believed that the providential protection that kept the small Jewish world alive would embrace his own extraordinary nation.

One La Jolla family’s story illuminates a persistent gap in our collective memory.

Before Salem, this small town succumbed to the witch-hunting fever.

The story of Mabel Ping‑Hua Lee.

How white-dominated racial power produces inter-ethnic group conflict.

“A camping area is a form, however primitive, of a city” —Constant Nieuwenhuys

Why do we eat pumpkin pie spice in the fall?

Reflections on Pavement, Nirvana, the very meaning of history, and the end of neoliberalism.

Since 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine was first introduced to the world, the US has regarded Cuba as key to its designs for Latin America.

And why won't all the worst people stop talking about it?

The author of the 20th century’s most influential history book anticipates the coming world order.

Medical debt has always been part of the history of nonprofit hospitals.

The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the U.S. in WWII was matched only by the ambivalence the U.S. showed toward principles on which WWII was fought.

The history of Head Start shows that child poverty is a choice.

In the past and present, librarians have fought book bans and censorship.

Female ghosts seem to dominate the afterlife. Whether the spirits are real or not, the reasons for the disparity could be revealing.

The birth, death and afterlife of our romance with tobacco.

John Kelly's statement about the Civil War is not surprising, but they are a reminder that we should still be worrying about the Civil War.

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.

Koch poured $2 million into an embryonic Libertarian Party to buoy his run for vice president. He knew he wouldn't win—but that wasn't the point.

In the South, the pairing was once as popular as PB&J.

The rifle is a consumer product to which advertisers successfully attached an identity—one that has translated to a particularly intractable politics.

In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the document has doomed our politics. But it can also save them.

This is the first post in our theme for October 2023, Urban Disability focusing on the role of cities in fostering disability rights.

The new album “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning” collects gospel songs recorded inside a notorious penitentiary.

On upending the accepted narrative of the movement.

A 1953 C.I.A.-backed coup that ousted Iran’s Cold War leader has colored U.S.-Iran relations for decades.

Chris Waltz was appalled. He felt Democrats were using the Sandy Hook tragedy to tell him he wasn’t responsible enough to own an AR-15.

The most hypnotic piece of music released so far in 2023 was recorded forty-seven years ago in a barely adequate studio in Rockland County, New York.

On factional strife in the Early Republic, and why parties themselves were universally despised.

The first of these festivals debuted in the early 1960s, serving as a prime example of the United States' burgeoning counterculture.

The Puritans outlawed Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan" because it was critical of the society they were building in colonial New England.

Edgar Allan Poe knew that readers would add their visual image of the author to his work to create a personality that informed their reading.