Excerpts

Robert A. Millikan was once a beloved figure in American science. In 2021, his name was removed from buildings and awards. What happened?

Cecil Brown wants to digitally revive the enslaved antebellum poet George Moses Horton. Can digital technology help reconnect us to the tradition he embodied?

The history of Black churches’ struggles offers both warnings and hope for the U.S. today.

How transphobia has been a consistent liability for Republicans, and why the right refuses to give it up.

In the 1950s, the U.S. military conducted unethical radiological experiments on Black communities, including the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex.

Arabness, Blackness, and the figure of terror.

This metamorphic record is a teaching tool, a flirtation device, a college radio favorite, a nostalgic object, and more. BOOP!

What happened in California in the 1970s played an outsized role in creating the world we live in today – both in the United States and globally.

My mother was a beloved doctor. She is also a reminder, to me, of every Black doctor who is not here with us but should be.

How shock jock comedy gave way to Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

One man's role in shaping the nation's best-loved long-distance footpath reminds us of the close bonds that Jews have formed with the North American landscape.

Some years wield such power that you must comply with them.

As evangelicals worked to gain public legitimacy during the Cold War, historians of evangelicalism search for a usable past for their fellow believers.

If history had taken another path, bar codes would look dramatically different today.

Forty years ago, the exiled South African activist dared to teach Zionism critically. A furious backlash ensued.

How did Americans come to love “mid-century modern”?

A formerly dominant American retail chain nears extinction.

How political misappropriations of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy fuel right-wing movements.

Migration patterns, cultural ties, geographic regions and class differences all shape speaking patterns.

Marco Rubio and Glenn Grothman want to recognize the contribution of Air America, the CIA airline that supported secret wars in Laos and Cambodia.

The Moog synthesizer was one of the most influential inventions in 20th-century sound. With the recent sale of the Asheville-based company, a new era begins.

The 1895 show purported to show a genuine Southern Black community and demonstrate Black cultural progress in America, from enslavement to citizenship.

Introducing a project on US labor history, exploring what we can learn from 1930s-1950s industrial struggles.

As a versatile but complex hero, King led a life open to interpretation by politicians and activists of all types who fiercely debated his legacy.

Exploring Deaf history, language and education as the hearing child of a Deaf adult.

Until both American and Mexican police forces stop treating it like a war, the violence of drug prohibition won't stop.

Farmworker housing cooperatives in Ventura County, California.

“Conventional wisdom tells us that the gold rush was a male undertaking,” writes the historian Glenda Riley. But women were there, too.

How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy.

A Civil War veteran, John William Boucher was one of the oldest men on the ground during the Great War.

On the early origins of a very American kind of writing.

Because of the growth of the Prohibition state, police abuse fomented considerable discussions among police and lawyer associations, criminologists, and others.

The slow unraveling of a nation’s suburbs.

Four important court cases that have defined the landscape of women’s rights in the United States.

As early at 1955, government reports indicated that DC’s emerging drug problem represented “a serious and tragic and expensive and ominous” development.

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.

Rewriting the history and future of an iconic suburb.

We cannot understand the last fifty years of U.S. history—certainly not the first thing about Black history—without studying the emergence and evolution of rap.

David Beito has penned one of the most damning scholarly histories of FDR to date.

An Alabama man faces execution by nitrogen gas—the first U.S. execution by gas in a quarter-century, 100 years after the practice began.

Long before the Sacklers appeared on the scene, families like the Astors and the Delanos cemented their upper-crust status through the global trade in opium.

How The Go-Go’s emerged from the LA punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album.

Barbecue is a cornerstone of American cuisine, containing all of the contradictions of the country itself.

Well before the hippies arrived, LSD and other hallucinogens were poised to enter the American mainstream.

In the 1950s the construction of a dam on the Texas–Mexico border displaced communities from their land—and anticipated the wall-building underway today.

100 years ago, Chief Justice William Howard Taft made the Court more efficient and more powerful, marking a turning point whose effects are still being felt.

On Samuel Moyn's Cold War liberalism.

The special relationship between the United States and Israel was cemented by the support offered by Lyndon B. Johnson throughout the sixties.

What happened to the Bailey family in the Detroit suburb of Warren became a flashpoint in the national battle over integration.

How the Southern Strategy of the late 20th century gave rise to the modern GOP.