Excerpts

The defining of corporations as legal “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment rights got a leg up from the fight over a California anti-Chinese immigrant law.

For as long as Americans have been subjected to lousy candidates, they’ve been told to suck it up and vote for one of them.

The UN’s failure to dismantle the colonial order foreclosed the application of the Genocide Convention to Israel, South Africa, and the United States.

Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.

Donald Trump’s candidacy wasn’t the first time the Republican Party was split by an outsider declaring war on the establishment elite.

Hurricane Katrina exposed deep inequities in federal disaster response. "We never felt so cut off in all our lives."

Best remembered as the partner of Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy, Evelyn Trent was an anti-colonial feminist who helped initiate India’s communist movement.

An entire industry wouldn't exist without him, yet few know his name. In his songs, Knott challenged the faithful to examine their faults and hypocrisies.

In 1974, after years of grinding war in Vietnam had exhausted most of the antiwar movement, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda came up with a new strategy.

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.

As a feminist in the adult-film industry, she believed the answer wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.

A radical third party had a new idea for selecting a presidential candidate, and it’s still in use today.

Hushpuppies are delicious, iconically Southern, and no one seems to have a clue where they came from.

On the suppression of sign language.

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction.

A new biography reveals how Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Americans a vocabulary to understand themselves in an era even more tempestuous than our own.

On the Irish writer’s grand tour of the Gilded Age United States.

Kevin Cook and Jeff Guinn on David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and the 1993 siege of Waco.

Romano’s book is a vital, comprehensive piece of media scholarship about one of the most influential outlets of the last century. It’s also fun as hell to read.

Organizing is a kind of alchemy: it turns alienation into connection, despair into dedication, and oppression into strength.

A UC Berkeley student’s award-winning research shines a light on LGBTQ+ life in Japanese American concentration camps during World War II.

A cartoon report on the only policy proven to address the housing shortage and how racism, inept management, and disinvestment led to long-term decline.

136 books that made America think.

Age of Revolutions was happy to interview Nathan Perl-Rosenthal about his new book, entitled 'The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It.'

A new series dramatizes Edwin Stanton's hunt for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators in the aftermath of the president’s 1865 assassination.

An effort is underway to restore President Wilson’s reputation as a great reformer. His best reforms were won by a mass movement, often pushing against Wilson.

Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.

The Duke Center for Firearms Law's efforts to catalog the history of gun laws.

Putting massive amounts of time in perspective is incredibly hard for humans, so we made this graphic.

The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.

The Kerner Commission was credited with exposing systemic racism that inspired resistance in Black communities. James Baldwin argued that it stated the obvious.

The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time.

Maria P. Williams pioneered filmmaking for African American women, but her life is even more thrilling than her sole film.

The real Andrew Johnson compared with the only film made about his life.

A rift in thinking about who should control powerful new technologies sent the brothers on diverging paths.

The history of grassroots banking politics has been overlooked — and even denied.

A documentary that follows the writer’s late-in-life journey to the South chronicles his vision for Black politics in a post–Civil Rights era world.

Who was buried in the lonely grave in New York’s potter’s field? The year-long search led to a lost world in the history of AIDS.

Congress’s periodic battles over the Farm Bill often pass unnoticed, but the document effectively determines what, how, and how much we eat.

Disappearing foods – and why they need protecting.

The turbulent history of an often forgotten moment that would leave blood in the streets and shape the modern landscape of Chicago.

Common in colonial New England, bundling allowed a suitor to spend a night in bed with his sweetheart—while her parents slept in the next room.

Matthew Lassiter’s history plays out in ranch houses, high school parking lots, and courtrooms from Shaker Heights to Westchester to Orange County.

While the concept stretches back centuries, it has garnered significant attention in recent decades.

The inventor of the atomic bomb, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s new film, was the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism.

A new television miniseries depicts the pursuit of Lincoln’s killer. But the public appetite for tales about the chase began even as it was happening.

Born into slavery, this preacher and Underground Railroad conductor served as the inspiration for a history-making book.

Right from the beginning, a commercial spirit and the wealth it generated were essential to creating and constituting America.

A look into neocolonialism in modern America.

But it didn’t work out for their parties.