Excerpts

Across the Americas, emancipation moved slowly, and profited those who had benefited from slavery most.

For some time now, the answer has not been the abolitionists.

Millions of Americans gained freedom from slavery in a slow-moving wave of emancipation during the Civil War and in the months afterward.

After the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln faced the issue of sorting out a nation divided over the issue of freed slaves. But what were his views on it?

Daniel Ellsberg's decision to release the Pentagon Papers didn't happen in a vacuum.

After revealing the government’s lies about Vietnam, Ellsberg spent six decades as an anti-nuclear activist, getting arrested in civil-disobedience protests.

In 1838, leaders of the Catholic order faced opposition from their own priests, but pressed forward with the sale of 272 human beings anyway.

A long history of disrespect, dispossession and mass slaughter is crucial to understanding the case.

The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction.

The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers is back with a new book, The Doomsday Machine.

A shameful part of America’s history.

What can past droughts tell us about tomorrow?

‘Time’ magazine and the unraveling of the American consensus.

In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics.

During the Jim Crow era, working-class Washingtonians' recreation options were far more limited—and dangerous.

A location-based timeline and interactive map of the L.A. Zoot Suit Riots.

The last relics of ‘lost cause’ ideology are being removed, as a federal panel renames US military bases that honored Confederate generals.

Diners have always been considered a model of culinary democratization in the American public consciousness, but can they really be for everyone?

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drug use to expand one’s consciousness went from an intellectual pastime to an emblem of social decay.

How abolitionists viewed the American flag.

In the sixties and seventies, the Sullivanian Institute had a winning sales pitch for young New Yorkers: parties, sex, low rent, and affordable therapy.

Skepticism drove some of this more cynical or realistic worldview, based on their experiences growing up in the 70s and 80s.

Asian sailors came to the west coast of America in 1587. Within a century they were settled in colonies from Mexico to Peru.

Recently declassified documents have exposed former Mexican president José López Portillo as a CIA asset.

Harry Washington fought for his enslaver's enemy during the American Revolution. Later, he migrated to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

As the British Empire's power expanded, piracy became criminalized.

Babe Ruth's final days revealed his mortality, and made more history, when he encountered a future U.S. president.

The focus of labor history is often—unsurprisingly—workers’ organizations and what has made them thrive or languish. But employers organized, too.

Long before “transgender” entered the lexicon, Christine Jorgensen became the year’s biggest story.

His story of coming out was so shrouded in scandal, so drenched in professional embarrassment, that its broader significance may forever be overshadowed.

With more queer history detectives, what could our future look like?

We should interrogate nostalgia’s primacy without advocating for its eradication.

The 1988 presidential primary showed it wasn't always like this — and helped guide the GOP to where it is now.

On Audrey Clare Farley’s “Girls and Their Monsters.”

Quite the contrary. They used rhetoric to build a partisan community, and realized that parties needed to create and market identities, not simply agendas.

The complicated, ever-changing, millennia-long relationship between insects and humans.

A new lawsuit builds on 50 years of history in environmental activism.

As a Harvard student, Kaczynski was part of an experiment backed by the Central Intelligence Agency that one author argued shaped his worldviews.

Decades of evidence reveals that work requirements for food assistance leave people hungry and hurt the economy. But supporting them remains good politics.

In 1828, Jackson's campaign argued that an 1824 victory was stolen from him. Is it really so clear-cut?

Incarcerated musicians have crafted some of the most iconic songs in American music history while prisons reap the profits.

How Latinos have used public radio and television to communicate their cultures, histories, hopes, and concerns.

The Temecula Valley school board in Southern California wants to erase gay rights leader Harvey Milk from history, defaming him as a “pedophile” in the process.

The U.S. government’s redress program for Japanese Americans showed that the money matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters.

In the late 19th century, William Dorsey Swann's private balls attracted unwelcome attention from authorities and the press.

NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated 60 years ago. His wife, the activist Myrlie Evers-Williams, has fought for his civil rights legacy ever since.

Thomas Dixon’s racist discourse lurks in American politics and society even today.

The political preacher who made the religion look bad.

The government responded with ruthless persecution — just one egregious example in the NSA’s long, sordid history of fiercely guarding its secrecy.

Two new books reveal the story of Stanford University’s early years to be rife with corruption, autocracy, incompetence, white supremacy, and murder.