Excerpts

In a new book, “Did it Happen Here?,” scholars debate what the F-word conceals and what it reveals.

The black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was one of the first to make films for a black audience, a rebuke to racist movies like "The Birth of a Nation."

The civil-rights attorney has created a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade.

A new film dramatizes Shirley Chisholm's history-making bid to become the first Black woman president in 1972.

It puts the people in the most peril in the center of the story: the people being systematically exploited, chained, whipped and raped.

The shuttering of the GM works in Lordstown will also bury a lost chapter in the fight for workers’ control.

The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, and one of the most persistent.

Researchers create massive genealogical network dating back 100,000 years

Romanticism, local color, and nostalgic New Orleans.

How a pop historian shaped the soul of Biden’s presidency.

How one house can contain larger stories of American migration and growth, reckonings with exclusion, and the advent of new technologies.

Amrita Myers paints freedom as a process in which Black women used the tools available to them to secure rights and privileges within a slave society.

An explosive new book delves into American Jewish McCarthyism from the 1950s through late 1970s.

When you dig beyond all purpose, digging becomes the purpose.

Water insecurity, territorial expansion, and the making of a US-Mexico border city.

The rise of the sport as we know it was centered in Gotham, where big stadiums, heroic characters, and epic sportswriting produced a pastime that bound a city together.

How a mid-century architecture competition reimagined the American home.

The feminist history of the crossword puzzle: some of the form's early champions were women working for little to no pay.

At the prodding of John and Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren took on a massive project: writing a comprehensive history of the Revolutionary War.

Right-wing evangelicalism’s moral and religious descent into Trumpism has been near-total. Is there a way out?

When Broadway was a broad way and Wall Street was a wall.

In the years after her husband John’s death, the harpist discovered a sound all her own, a jazz rooted in acts of spirit and will.

Meditating on blotter not just as art, or as a historical artifact, but as a kind of media, even a “meta medium.”

The story of the Los Angeles Municipal News, and the hope — and limitations — of publicly owned newsrooms.

Richardson’s work is as much about the contradictions of our shared past as it is an urgent call to action around the current authoritarian crisis.

Female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds fought to tell their own stories.

In this new hobby, I found so many stories.

Audubon drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature, helping them see it in national and environmental terms.

How Louisiana built a carceral state during the War on Crime.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific shows the limits–and power–of mainstream entertainment in addressing weighty social topics.

As an undercover investigator, Rose Mackenberg unmasked hundreds of America’s fake psychics.

The early years of a future basketball icon.

Even popular cookies can end up permanently cut from the roster.

A new history of labor organizing in Coachella tells us the story of the United Farm Workers and how its rank-and-file members drove the union to success.

An intellectual history of inequality in economic theory reveals the ideological reasons behind the field’s resurgence in the last few decades.

In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly reinvented themselves.

He moved to California during the Nazi era, and his music—which ranged from the lushly melodic to the rigorously atonal—caught the ears of everyone.

Native son Jonah Walters finds something entirely too innocent about the tales told about the anthracite industry’s origins.

The SS Eastland disaster and Chicago's ghosts.

Galvanized by an act of racial violence, the band A Grain of Sand brought a new version of Asian American activism and identity to the folk music scene.

For some, it is a luscious dessert, a delightful treasure hiding in the woods. For others, it is, to say the least, an acquired taste. It is an enigma.

In 1976, Ronald Reagan found owning the soul of a party isn’t the same as taking home its nomination.

For what did these Americans endure such painful hardship and sacrifice? For what were they taking such a significant stand? Surely, it wasn’t just about tea!

This is the story of Giovanni da Verrazzano, who never reached Asia, but became the first European to set foot on the site of the future city of New York.

Christian moralists long promoted hobbies as a way to occupy idle hands, bringing the work ethic into free time. Today hobbies risk turning into side hustles.

A groundbreaking new book demonstrates that even during the days of slavery, African Americans knew a lot more about legal principles than has been imagined.

U.S.-funded social networks were launched in 2010 with ZunZuneo and Piramideo in 2013.

John A. Williams’s unsung novel.

Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’s classic 'Huckleberry Finn' into a tragedy.

From a 1915 suffragist road trip to the “First Lady of Drag Racing.”