Excerpts

“Hendrix used a range of technological innovations...to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.”

The New York Times’ series on slavery relies on bad scholarship to make an argument with an inauspicious history.

Writing under ancient veneers allowed partisans to politicize and weaponize ancient history during the turbulent start of the Federal Republic.

Leila Philip's book is thrilling, both on scientific and historical levels.

Economists and historians have been telling us the wrong story about Continental currency for two centuries.

Perhaps, in ethical terms, it doesn’t matter whether overhunting was or was not the cause of the passenger pigeon’s extinction. Practically speaking, it matters a good deal.

What happened when a diplomat teamed up with Sigmund Freud to analyse the president?

In 1950s America, the Cold War was raging, but socialists were playing key roles in the early civil rights movement.

A Green Mountain Boy's controversial death and its consequences.

A collection of previously unpublished stories offers a portrait of the playwright as a young artist.

In 1967, Milton Friedman launched a counterrevolution in economics that overturned the Keynesian theory of inflation.

My research shows that this tradition runs deep.

In the 1940s, the Irgun went to the heart of American culture to garner support for its campaign of violent insurrection.

Hot pants served as a sartorial riposte to the fashion industry’s relentless campaign for the midi.

An interview with Jennifer Burns on her authoritative new biography of the American economist and the personal and intellectual origins of his theories.

One woman’s crusade for democratic participation and political efficacy in the face of powerful institutions.

During the interwar years, the American journalist reported on political unrest in Cuba, Germany and Spain.

The story of the Little Longfellow War.

Her athletic performance in New York impressed onlookers of all colors and cracked opened the door for a new generation of Black players to come.

The author of ‘The Stranger’ toured the Americas in the years following World War II. He found prosperity and absurdity in plenty.

As a white teenager in Charlotte, Elizabeth Prewitt saw mandatory school busing as a personal annoyance. Going to an integrated high school changed that.

By tracing commodities beyond the human, we can learn a great deal about how cities function as ecological and economic units.

Simone's birthplace in Tryon, North Carolina, was declared a National Treasure. Now, local events celebrate her and raise money for preservation efforts.

No, aliens haven’t visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?

Before Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” won song of the year at the CMAs, hit maker Ted Jarrett’s music topped the country charts.

I lived on Indian Creek with my grandparents after my mother suffered a nervous breakdown.

Tom Scully is as responsible as anyone for the way health care in America works today.

American Indian tribes have long used activism in their struggle for justice and the preservation of their lands and culture.

From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?

Reflections on Freedom House and citizen participation in Boston's urban renewal.

How Detroit cops and courts steer segregation and drive incarceration.

Activists established politically informed shops to offer alternatives to the consumer culture of chain stores, mass production, and multinational corporations.

A windowless telecommunications hub, 33 Thomas Street in New York City embodies an architecture of surveillance and paranoia, an ideal set for conspiracy thrillers.

1915 marked the beginning of the largest domestic migration in American history. Hundreds of thousands of Black Americans began relocating north.

Coming to terms with Boston’s racist legacy in “Small Mercies."

The course was getting a first read after years of review. Then, the Texas Board of Education needed more time to assess it without “drama or controversy.”

Bands like L7 and Heavens to Betsy were instrumental to the birth of the grunge scene, but for decades were treated like novelties and sex objects.

When metalworker George Stephen, Sr. put two halves of a buoy together, he didn't know he was making a charcoal grill that would stand the test of time.

Black-appeal stations were instrumental in propelling R&B into the mainstream while broadcasting news of the ever-growing civil rights movement.

The paradoxes of C.L.R. James.

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow will be no better.

"I idolized women like Marvel Cooke," Angela Davis tells Teen Vogue.

Earthen Indigenous burial mounds were created in the shape of birds, reptiles and mammals.

One interpretation presents the country as irredeemably tainted by its past. Another contends that the United States has also tended toward egalitarianism.

"Frustratingly, Talmudically, Jewish food is simply what Jews eat," she writes.

Federal lighthouses symbolized a vigorous young nation barreling toward maturity.

Throughout its botanical, cultural, and social history, the watermelon has been a vehicle for our ideas about community, survival, and what we owe the future.

In the early 1970s, the idea that private life meant a right to be left alone – an idea forged over centuries – began to disappear. We should mourn its absence.

Quills were once the default writing tool, when pens rose to prominence their impact on writing would be a hot debate in the literary world, and now computers.

Harry Bridges may no longer be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today’s most ambitious organizing campaigns.