Excerpts

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.

Communists were excluded from an Oklahoma Pride festival recently, a reminder of how easily the Red Scare’s mechanisms for state repression can be revived.

A revisionist view of the drug wars.

He demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering.

Gas stations caused a $20 billion toxic mess — and it’s not going away.

Twenty years ago, Sandra Day O'Connor's deleted draft opinion rejected favoring white applicants over Asian Americans. Why did Clarence Thomas adopt it?

The conservative backlash to the civil-rights era began immediately — and now it’s nearly complete.

He was said to have gone into decline, but his story is one of endurance—even of unlikely triumph.

In 1968, impoverished Americans flocked to DC to live out MLK's final dream: economic equality for all.

Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis say they would restore the Fort Bragg name if elected. Its namesake was a “merciless tyrant” who helped lose the Civil War.

How nostalgic fantasies about the “authentic” New York City obscure the real-world place.

The Club Manhattan could hold about 250 people. They did not know it at the time, but they were the earliest witnesses to the rise of the Queen of Rock & Roll.

Portraying a 19th-century president.

James Watt was a fiery evangelical, a cultural laughingstock—and instrumental in shaping modern GOP rhetoric on the environment.

Over the course of her 83 years, the megawatt star that was Tina Turner kept telling us who she was in the hopes that we would see her — all of her.

"Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks – A Cool History of a Hot Commodity" reveals the history of frozen water and its impact on American life and culture.

The American right doesn’t need the John Birch Society these days, but that is because it’s adopted the Birchers’ extremism wholesale.

Farewell to the senator's son who pioneered a TV genre, helped create the Christian right, ran for president, and earned the grudging respect of Abbie Hoffman.

On the moral courage of Daniel Ellsberg.

From the Spanish-American War to modern cocktail bars, the daiquiri has a long legacy entangled with US imperialism in the Caribbean.

It would be a mistake to think of the current wave of attacks on “critical race theory” as a culture war. This is a political battle.

The Gadsden flag has reemerged as a provocative antigovernmental symbol, including at the Capitol riot and on license plates. Confederates once loved it, too.

A conversation with Colin Kaepernick on Black studies, white supremacy, and capitalism.

Across the Americas, emancipation moved slowly, and profited those who had benefited from slavery most.

For some time now, the answer has not been the abolitionists.

Millions of Americans gained freedom from slavery in a slow-moving wave of emancipation during the Civil War and in the months afterward.

After the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln faced the issue of sorting out a nation divided over the issue of freed slaves. But what were his views on it?

Daniel Ellsberg's decision to release the Pentagon Papers didn't happen in a vacuum.

After revealing the government’s lies about Vietnam, Ellsberg spent six decades as an anti-nuclear activist, getting arrested in civil-disobedience protests.

In 1838, leaders of the Catholic order faced opposition from their own priests, but pressed forward with the sale of 272 human beings anyway.

A long history of disrespect, dispossession and mass slaughter is crucial to understanding the case.

The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction.

The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers is back with a new book, The Doomsday Machine.

A shameful part of America’s history.

What can past droughts tell us about tomorrow?

‘Time’ magazine and the unraveling of the American consensus.

In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics.

During the Jim Crow era, working-class Washingtonians' recreation options were far more limited—and dangerous.

A location-based timeline and interactive map of the L.A. Zoot Suit Riots.

The last relics of ‘lost cause’ ideology are being removed, as a federal panel renames US military bases that honored Confederate generals.

Diners have always been considered a model of culinary democratization in the American public consciousness, but can they really be for everyone?

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drug use to expand one’s consciousness went from an intellectual pastime to an emblem of social decay.

How abolitionists viewed the American flag.

In the sixties and seventies, the Sullivanian Institute had a winning sales pitch for young New Yorkers: parties, sex, low rent, and affordable therapy.

Skepticism drove some of this more cynical or realistic worldview, based on their experiences growing up in the 70s and 80s.

Asian sailors came to the west coast of America in 1587. Within a century they were settled in colonies from Mexico to Peru.

Recently declassified documents have exposed former Mexican president José López Portillo as a CIA asset.

Harry Washington fought for his enslaver's enemy during the American Revolution. Later, he migrated to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

As the British Empire's power expanded, piracy became criminalized.