Excerpts

Trump champions “law and order” while calling for the Constitution’s suspension. But there’s no tension between the two.

On this date 78 years ago, the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. Survivors involuntarily provided key medical data for years, without receiving any help.

Stars of the movie about an iconic Mattel toy are on strike. Both the company’s history and Barbie’s plot illuminate how powerful corporations really are.

Forced by the federal government to attend the schools, generations of Native American children were sexually assaulted, beaten and emotionally abused.

Meet the feuding twin sisters who popularized the American advice column.

At 12 years old, Martha Hodes was on board a hijacked plane and was taken hostage for a week. How did she forget much of the experience?

The commander in chief's unexpected death in office 100 years ago fueled decades of conspiracy theories but was most likely the result of a heart attack.

For centuries, the infamous Boss Tweed was blamed for destroying its dino-models—but what really happened is even weirder.

The “Barbie” movie glides over the history of dolls as powerful cultural objects.

Would the new owner of Richland Farm let a Black woman continue to visit to pay tribute to her enslaved ancestors?

How documenting the history of the drug war is a “community project” and reflections on 1990s rap music's anti-crack hits.

Where abolitionists and congressmen—including Lincoln—dined, debated, and became bedfellows.

On the importance of material ownership in the context of Black history.

Dan Flores reminds us that modern North Americans still walk in the footsteps of our fellow animals.

Uncovering a tradition of African American radicalism that was—and is—a crucial part of the American left’s history.

How did record collecting and stereophile culture come to exclude women as consumers and experts?

In yoga’s early days in the United States, skeptics warned it would lead people (e.g., women) of good faith and standing into paganism and ill repute.

Separate areas with sofas, vanities, and even writing tables used to put the “rest” in women’s restrooms. Why were these spaces built, and why did they vanish?

The ruthless logic driving our economy can be traced back to 19th-century Palo Alto.

The haute beachwear known as the bikini was named after a string of islands turned into a nuclear wasteland by atomic bomb testing.

The author was monitored for his political activities, but also for being gay. The surveillance took a toll on him.

It’s not a flavor; it’s a vibe.

He marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., after he witnessed atrocities while liberating Nazi death camps.

Franklin D. Roosevelt called the Evian Conference in France in 1938, as the Holocaust loomed. It remains “an indelible stain on American and world history.”

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence– but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans.

Stowe’s novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the institution.

Federal agencies awarded millions of dollars to scientific studies on Native American human remains, undermining the goals of tribes fighting for repatriation.

A collection of high school yearbooks from Cleveland captures the rise, fall, and uncertain future of the American middle class.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. came with censorship and obfuscation about the effects of the radiation on those who were exposed.

“If the public pool isn’t available and open, you don’t swim.”

Jim Crow terror, within and outside the law.

How a mob statute metastasized.

Rollins never wavered in his determination to get things right, and often that meant reinventing himself and, along the way, jazz as well.

It was the first Southern school to be integrated by court order, and the town reluctantly prepared to comply. Then an acolyte of Ezra Pound’s showed up.

A new book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing traces the path from Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment ideology to today’s radicalized right.

Henry Choate, 18, was killed, dragged from the back of a car through Columbia, Tenn., and his body was hanged at the Maury County Courthouse.

Watching 'Oppenheimer' with the author of a definitive account of the Manhattan Project.

Sean Mirski terms the Monroe Doctrine “revolutionary” in his impressively erudite "We May Dominate the World."

As America has transformed, so too has its famous footpath. Less than half the A.T. remains where it was originally laid.

Rival entrepreneurs took drastic steps to draw visitors away from Mammoth Cave in the early 20th century.

A recent biography dives into the choreographer's role as both an artist and figure of early American modernism.

Our ways of thinking about thinking are a product of postwar business culture.

Newly digitized journals reveal the life of Gouverneur Morris, the Constitution preamble writer, vocal opponent of slavery and disabled congressman.

What happens when radical historians write for the public.

The actual, and mythic, roles played by Irish immigrants in New York now fed the imaginations of the young Irish immigrants carving space for themselves in the 1980s.

Before Christopher Nolan’s "Oppenheimer," the world nearly got Ayn Rand’s "Tribute to Free Enterprise."

On the mobility controls faced by refugees, and who had the right to remain in American cities and states in the Early Republic.

“The sign has become a worldwide symbol of the Hollywood of the imagination, and it allows anyone who sees it to fill it with whatever meaning they want.”

On John Sturges’s “Bad Day at Black Rock” and Japanese America.

A Black cemetery by the site of the former Greenlawn Cemetery in Indianapolis is now a point of contention as the city plans to develop the area.