Excerpts

Activists are working to preserve the history of the “wade-ins” that opened the space to everyone.

The Brown v. Board of Education ruling opened the floodgates for busing across the country, but what happened when the buses stopped rolling?

A massive protest by Mexican American high school students was a milestone in a movement for Chicano rights.

How one doctor’s letter and a string of dodgy studies spurred a public health panic.

Yaupon tea, a botanical cousin to yerba maté, is now almost unknown.

The real history of Juneteenth is much messier—and more inspiring.

A new biography of William Still show how the abolitionist documented the underground railroad as he helped people through it.

The Declaration of Independence seems to Pauline Maier to be "peculiarly unsuited" for the role that it eventually came to play in America.

The blockbuster "Jaws" (1975) provoked fear by portraying sharks as "mindless eating machines." But what did people think of sharks before then?

The reasons have to do with the complexity of the transaction, but also with the industry’s explosive growth in its early years.

With the emergence of the US as a global superpower in the twentieth-century, anti-Palestinian stereotypes in the media bled over to stigmatize Arab Americans.

Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother were brutally murdered, possibly by Lizzie herself, in August 1892. Why are we still dissecting the crime?

Lessons on race-neutral admissions from California.

One of the most indispensable guitarists of all time, Carter was a quiet revolutionary.

On Philip Dray’s “A Lynching at Port Jervis.”

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum was deeply involved with the Ku Klux Klan while designing the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Ga.

A companion to a new PBS film, "The Memorial Day Massacre," the first oral history exploring the murder of 10 workers in Chicago.

"The Essential Willie Nelson" compilation demonstrates the continuity of Nelson's style across a variety of musical genres.

How did a field meant to reclaim genetics from Nazi abuses wind up a haven for race science?

On the necessary “deep sincerity” of dark humor.

The greatest unsolved murders in Los Angeles' history, bloodier than the Black Dahlia, more vicious than the hit on Bugsy Siegel, occurred on a night in 1871.

His works underpins the Dobbs decision. His legacy matters enormously to what's next for constitutional law.

Immersive displays brought 19th century spectators to far-off places and distant battles. The way they portrayed history, however, was often inaccurate.

A new book revisits Freud’s analysis of Woodrow Wilson to ask: how much do leaders’ psychologies shape our politics?

A new history cuts against stereotypes, to show a region constantly changing—and whose future is up for grabs.

Interposition was a claim that American federalism needed to preserve some balance between state and national authority.

Research shows structural racism in 1900s U.S. society harmed Black health in ways still being felt today.

Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history.

It is more likely that immigrants were their own agents of change.

Giving Stonewall too much credit misses the movement’s growing strength in the 1960s, sociologists note.

In “The 272,” Rachel L. Swarns sets out how the country’s first Catholic university profited from the sale of enslaved people.

The murder that challenged Cotton Mather’s complex views about race, slavery, and Christianity.

The long history of trans.

For decades, gay men gathered anonymously at the Everard Baths, seeking sexual liaisons and camaraderie alike.

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness.

Before going to the press, Ellsberg spent a year and a half quietly leaking the Pentagon Papers to leading antiwar lawmakers. They all declined to speak out.

Ted Kaczynski’s criticisms of environmental destruction and out-of-control technology were incisive, but his terroristic methods had no chance of solving those problems.

A history of record-breaking highs but also of sweaty, sticky, corporeal experiences.

How the fight of one Black Texas family to make freedom real offers lessons for Texas lawmakers trying to erase history from the classroom.

The way we learn about our collective past is under attack thanks to new leadership at the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA).

The arson attack on a New Orleans nightclub was the largest massacre of queer people in 20th-century America—and it remains relevant to our present moment.

The conservative justice is on course for an originalist fight with Neil Gorsuch.

We have good reason to remember the story of what happened to hubristic rich people, and the imprisoned poor, in an enormous opulent floating palace.

Lyndon Johnson and the events in Dallas.

The lawsuit against Harvard forces us to talk about Asian Americans' role in the racial equity debate.

The history of food inflation during World War I, and the riots that halted it, show how capitalists take advantage of consumer expectations to price gouge.

The kinds of narratives historians tend to fall back on constrain our ability to imagine alternatives to the way things have been, and to the way things are.

Lawyers tried to use the independent-state-legislature theory to sway the outcomes of the 2000 and 2020 elections. What if it were to become the law of the land?

Without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from.

The most visible symbol of a labor movement that isn't dead yet, that is willing to fight, not just make backroom deals.