Excerpts

Immersive displays brought 19th century spectators to far-off places and distant battles. The way they portrayed history, however, was often inaccurate.

A new book revisits Freud’s analysis of Woodrow Wilson to ask: how much do leaders’ psychologies shape our politics?

A new history cuts against stereotypes, to show a region constantly changing—and whose future is up for grabs.

Interposition was a claim that American federalism needed to preserve some balance between state and national authority.

Research shows structural racism in 1900s U.S. society harmed Black health in ways still being felt today.

Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history.

It is more likely that immigrants were their own agents of change.

Giving Stonewall too much credit misses the movement’s growing strength in the 1960s, sociologists note.

In “The 272,” Rachel L. Swarns sets out how the country’s first Catholic university profited from the sale of enslaved people.

The murder that challenged Cotton Mather’s complex views about race, slavery, and Christianity.

The long history of trans.

For decades, gay men gathered anonymously at the Everard Baths, seeking sexual liaisons and camaraderie alike.

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness.

Before going to the press, Ellsberg spent a year and a half quietly leaking the Pentagon Papers to leading antiwar lawmakers. They all declined to speak out.

Ted Kaczynski’s criticisms of environmental destruction and out-of-control technology were incisive, but his terroristic methods had no chance of solving those problems.

A history of record-breaking highs but also of sweaty, sticky, corporeal experiences.

How the fight of one Black Texas family to make freedom real offers lessons for Texas lawmakers trying to erase history from the classroom.

The way we learn about our collective past is under attack thanks to new leadership at the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA).

The arson attack on a New Orleans nightclub was the largest massacre of queer people in 20th-century America—and it remains relevant to our present moment.

The conservative justice is on course for an originalist fight with Neil Gorsuch.

We have good reason to remember the story of what happened to hubristic rich people, and the imprisoned poor, in an enormous opulent floating palace.

Lyndon Johnson and the events in Dallas.

The lawsuit against Harvard forces us to talk about Asian Americans' role in the racial equity debate.

The history of food inflation during World War I, and the riots that halted it, show how capitalists take advantage of consumer expectations to price gouge.

The kinds of narratives historians tend to fall back on constrain our ability to imagine alternatives to the way things have been, and to the way things are.

Lawyers tried to use the independent-state-legislature theory to sway the outcomes of the 2000 and 2020 elections. What if it were to become the law of the land?

Without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from.

The most visible symbol of a labor movement that isn't dead yet, that is willing to fight, not just make backroom deals.

Communists were excluded from an Oklahoma Pride festival recently, a reminder of how easily the Red Scare’s mechanisms for state repression can be revived.

A revisionist view of the drug wars.

He demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering.

Gas stations caused a $20 billion toxic mess — and it’s not going away.

Twenty years ago, Sandra Day O'Connor's deleted draft opinion rejected favoring white applicants over Asian Americans. Why did Clarence Thomas adopt it?

The conservative backlash to the civil-rights era began immediately — and now it’s nearly complete.

He was said to have gone into decline, but his story is one of endurance—even of unlikely triumph.

In 1968, impoverished Americans flocked to DC to live out MLK's final dream: economic equality for all.

Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis say they would restore the Fort Bragg name if elected. Its namesake was a “merciless tyrant” who helped lose the Civil War.

How nostalgic fantasies about the “authentic” New York City obscure the real-world place.

The Club Manhattan could hold about 250 people. They did not know it at the time, but they were the earliest witnesses to the rise of the Queen of Rock & Roll.

Portraying a 19th-century president.

James Watt was a fiery evangelical, a cultural laughingstock—and instrumental in shaping modern GOP rhetoric on the environment.

Over the course of her 83 years, the megawatt star that was Tina Turner kept telling us who she was in the hopes that we would see her — all of her.

"Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks – A Cool History of a Hot Commodity" reveals the history of frozen water and its impact on American life and culture.

The American right doesn’t need the John Birch Society these days, but that is because it’s adopted the Birchers’ extremism wholesale.

Farewell to the senator's son who pioneered a TV genre, helped create the Christian right, ran for president, and earned the grudging respect of Abbie Hoffman.

On the moral courage of Daniel Ellsberg.

From the Spanish-American War to modern cocktail bars, the daiquiri has a long legacy entangled with US imperialism in the Caribbean.

It would be a mistake to think of the current wave of attacks on “critical race theory” as a culture war. This is a political battle.

The Gadsden flag has reemerged as a provocative antigovernmental symbol, including at the Capitol riot and on license plates. Confederates once loved it, too.

A conversation with Colin Kaepernick on Black studies, white supremacy, and capitalism.