Excerpts

A detailed look on Abraham Lincoln's political philosophy on slavery, ownership, and freedom.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the beloved children’s television show was shaped by the African-American communities in Harlem and beyond.

The culture of calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood.

When we think of Jonathan Edwards, most probably think first of him as a theologian or preacher. But a new book also shows him as a mentor.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, Geronimo, Robert Oppenheimer, Steven Spielberg, and the mysteries of New Mexico's desert.

A document in her papers in the Library of Congress sheds new light on postwar research on psychedelics.

On April 5, 1910, the world was stunned by socialists’ victory at the ballot box in Milwaukee.

We still live with the consequences of the 28th president’s fuzzy thinking.

Harry Emerson Fosdick's ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’

To understand the proslavery defense of the 1850s, one must reckon with the proslavery Malthusianism articulated by Cooper in the 1820s.

James Forten was one of Philadelphia’s most distinguished and important citizens.

Steps from Georgetown, a memorial to Teddy Roosevelt stands amid ghosts of previous inhabitants: the Nacotchtank, colonist enslavers, and the emancipated.

In one of the most unique cases in the history of race riots, the African American businessperson sued his birthplace of Onancock, Virginia, in September 1910.

America's obsession with football is nearly as old as the game itself.

Baptists were never monolithic on the issue of slavery, but Southern Baptists were united in their opposition to Northern Baptists determining their beliefs.

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.

Or, why families under siege make for great movies.

The resistance and unionism of enslaved and freed Black women in the midst of the Confederacy is an epic story of sacrifice for nation and citizenship.

Ideas dating back to slavery have minimized opportunities for Black quarterbacks in the NFL.

A Barthesian bristle and the curious power of Walt Whitman’s posthumous eyelids.

A front-row seat to a slow-moving catastrophe. How tech both helps and hurts our world.

No, castoreum is not a cheap substitute for strawberries; it’s luxe, artisanal secretions from a beaver's rear end.

What the debate about the Arctic Refuge tells us about science denialism.

Belknap’s downfall was his decision to abuse his authority to appoint “sutlers” or civilian merchants who ran trading posts that served military outposts.

A Hungarian immigrant first brought the soccer style field kick to the NFL.

San Francisco 49ers fans may feel like their team name is less racist than the “Chiefs,” but given the history of the Gold Rush, they shouldn’t be so smug.

NIMBYs were citizen activists who set a model for participatory democracy that YIMBYs should follow.

Kate Mullany's former home in Troy, New York honors one of the earliest women's labor unions that sought fair pay and safe working conditions.

Journalist Rachel Nolan investigates tens of thousands of forced adoptions and the U.S. policy that enabled them.

US intelligence agencies seem to have adopted Orwell’s idea of doublethink—“to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.”

A literary examination of Henry David Thoreau's life and legacy today.

After over a century, the unelected mascot of St. Louis is finally losing its place in public life.

When the Pentagon wanted a photographer to record the largest airborne assault in the Vietnam War, the most qualified candidate was a young French woman.

Before its subversion in the Jim Crow era, the fruit symbolized black self-sufficiency.

What did Truman and Oppenheimer actually say in that room?

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.

Many of the ­private colleges and universities in the US arose as much out of vanity as necessity. But for morbid narcissism, nothing comes close to Stanford.

Comparing the struggles of Mexican and Greek immigrants to the United States.

Before the first disposable sanitary napkin hit the mass market, periods were thought of in a much different way.

The mistress of JFK, there was a lot more than wealth, whiteness, and femininity to make Mary Pinchot Meyer a target of murder.

How race-based legacies of disinvestment initiated by New Deal Era redlining regimes were followed by decades of over-policing at the scale of the neighborhood.

Two gifted sisters in Philadelphia helped to transform early American science.

In the fight over keeping Trump’s name on the ballot, the 2000 decision is a warning but not a precedent.

The Czech composer came to New York with the conviction that African-American melodies would be the ‘seedbed’ for their nation’s 20th-century music.

The music that grew out of Durham's tobacco manufacturing plants influenced some of the most widely recorded musicians of the last 65 years—and still does.

On the folly of relying on history to settle the debate over whether the Fourteenth Amendment should bar Trump from office.

Earl Tupper invented the container's seal, but it was a savvy, convention-defying entrepreneur who got the product line into the homes of housewives.

Activists are often held up as exemplars of personal morality — but in every social struggle, ordinary people with complex lives rise up as leaders.

The transformation of Alabama politics in the 1960s and 1970s reflected the rise of a new version of Republicanism that Trump has perfected.

The invasion is still the most important foreign policy decision by a 21st century U.S. president, so the surfeit of analysis should surprise no one.