Excerpts

One of the thousands of white Southerners who supported the Union during the Civil War and a rare example of a slave owner who changed his views on race.

The only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.

The famous disaster razed a metropolis and spread a pack of colorful lies. To sift through the ashes today is to encounter some uncomfortable truths.

And the ways capital took advantage of the state's policing of sexuality.

The program was about education. But it was also about surveillance.

How American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.

Two new books model radically different ways of studying the past.

Requiring rest, rather than work, is still a radical idea.

A new book exposes effects of anti-Black myth-making and calls for an end to the family policing system.

Pence invoked them at the Republican debates, but a true reckoning with their history provides a different vision of the nation’s future.

A left that is ambivalent about liberalism can still seek to engage it.

To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

Chile’s president was in Washington over the weekend to mark a grim anniversary. Congress is still asking questions about the U.S. role in the 1973 coup.

The neoliberal order has been exposed as fraudulent, inefficient, and inequitable. Yet it hardly lies in the dustbin of history.

Reconstruction-era opponents of racial equality popularized the charge that protecting civil rights would amount to the end of capitalism.

The story of the man who introduced ice cubes into our beverages.

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

A new book illuminates how Black Americans used property ownership, common law and other methods to assert their rights.

Decisions made now could shape the next 100 years.

How the dream of air conditioning turned into the dark future of climate change.

Rather than viewing strikes as a last-resort bargaining tactic, the labor movement must embrace them as engines of political transformation.

A journalistic view of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, work, and representation in American society.

There were more government shutdowns under Ronald Reagan than under every president since, combined. But some were as short as a few hours.

The famed opera has been criticized for its racist portrayals of Asian-Americans.

Cable TV's backers sold the technology as a boon to democracy, but embraced a business model that chased niche audiences.

Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Tillerson era.

To Heather Cox Richardson, the battle for our history is the battle for our democracy. And we may be nearing the endgame.

Municipal governments today hold around $4 trillion in outstanding debt. The growing costs of simply servicing their debt is cannibalizing their annual budgets.

A pair of minor league clubs are asking the court to reverse the league’s lucrative 101-year-old antitrust exemption.

The “Barbenheimer” double feature captures the dawn of our imperiled era.

Conservative Christians are out to restore their historical legal privileges.

There have always been two Americas. One based in religious zeal, mythology, and inequality; and one grounded in rule of the people and the pursuit of equality.

The reissue of “Tim” shows both the prescience and the unrealized promise of the beloved band.

In the last decade, some graffiti writers have moved from outlaw taggers to sought-after artists.

The Max series makes a radical argument for what constitutes American history.

In the late 1970s, mysterious circular patterns started showing up in farm fields.

The New Deal brought Black voters over to the Democratic Party, but was marred by racial inequality.

Tocqueville understood how constitutional review, without meaningful checks, could enable judicial despotism.

A biography of the towers that became "bane as well as boon to lower Manhattan."

The winding story of how a trove of 8,000 of the poet’s family objects were saved.

An exploration of the family stories, Southern territory, and distortions of memory that Lucinda Williams' songwriting evokes.

Shelby Foote, failed novelist and closeted member of the Tribe, turned the Civil War into a masterpiece of American literature.

Wielding Holocaust memory to make America look good is an American tradition.

The age of optimism that lasted in the US from the 1940s to the 1970s looked, basically, like a car.

On the 50th anniversary of "The Jewish Catalog."

America’s 37th president tried to save America’s Russia policy in the 1990s.

Fifty years ago, parents united to get the far-right John Birch Society out of their schools.

Machine-graded bubble sheets are the defining feature of American schools. Today’s kindergartners may never have to fill one out.

Gloria Steinem on the making of America's first feminist publication.

How Cold War liberalism abandoned the vocabulary of hope—and how we still live with the consequences.