Excerpts

Doctors who sterilized Carrie Buck said she was a “feeble-minded” woman whose future offspring posed a threat to society. Her life paints a different picture.

In his new book, historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom chronicles the collapse of public transportation in US cities — and explains who really deserves the blame.

Historians haven't only underestimated the sheer number of underage Union soldiers, they've also overlooked the internal battles those youths provoked.

Ever since the execution of labor radicals in 1886, reactionaries have tried to tarnish their legacy — and leftists have honored them as working-class martyrs.

Ben Smith’s book on the history of the viral internet doesn’t truly reckon with the costs of traffic worship.

A new book considers the possible alternative outcomes of the battles in America's war for independence.

By leading the risky but eventually successful financial operation, Elisha justified his name.

The following is a list of quotations misattributed to George Washington that have been sent to the Mount Vernon Library in recent years.

A recent viral sensation identifies the migration of poor whites as the cause of the problem—letting the rest of us off the hook!

Dwight L. Moody and the 1884 Haymarket Affair offer a look at what happens when Christians side with the wealthy instead of working class.

On the second anniversary of MLK's assassination, political prisoner Martin Sostre wrote a tribute emphasizing his radical disobedience.

Labor activists can learn from the decades-long campaign to undermine their influence by focusing on state-level action to bolster their cause.

1970s United Fruit CEO Eli Black got caught between the warring ideals of ‘social responsibility’ and shareholder gains.

Behind the Oklahoma City bombing and even the January 6th attack was a military-style assault in Texas that galvanized the far right.

As a student in Paris and a photographer at the Washington Times-Herald, the future First Lady worked behind the lens to bring her own ideas into focus.

The book was an especially formal response to the complications of white supremacy, segregated democracy, and civil war.

My hunt for one man across the lonely expanse of the queer past ended in a place I never expected.

First came 'Candid Camera.' Then 'The Truman Show.' Now, a new swath of TV speaks to 21st-century voyeurism.

How did Calle de los Negros get its name? And why did the city raze it in 1887?

More than 30 years ago, the "French paradox" got America bleary-eyed.

The ethnic enclave in Lower Manhattan was home to refugees fleeing civil war and entrepreneurs taking advantage of a globalizing economy.

First, the GOP became the party of tax cuts and now it won't touch entitlements — which makes a balanced budget nearly impossible.

Nasology was a 19th century pseudoscience which claimed to explain personality traits based on the shape of a person’s nose.

Philadelphia portrait studios in the Age of the Daguerreotype (1840-1849).

One hundred years ago, a group of U.S. academics and soldiers revolutionized warfare. We’re still seeing the results today.

A new book makes the case for a more pragmatic anti-policing movement—one that seeks to build working-class solidarity across racial lines.

The 1982 attack against Vincent Chin redefined hate crimes and energized a push for today’s stronger legal protections.

The conservative comedian spoke out for gay rights and gun control, and got boycotted and ostracized by friends on the right, including Ronald Reagan.

The new documentary “I Am Everything” explores the gulf between what Richard accomplished and what he got for it.

Already prone to boiler explosions that regularly killed scores of passengers, steamboats were pushed to their limits in races that valued speed over safety.

Seventy years after a disgraceful episode of anti-LGTBQ history, we are facing a new wave of McCarthyist fearmongering.

The secret history and unlearned lessons of the Cuban missile crisis.

The history and context of the made-up aesthetics of the early Ku Klux Klan.

Out of a common history emerged racism, capitalism, and the whole world. This offers us a clue on how to change that world.

A new biography of Phillis Wheatley places her in her era and shows the ways she used poetry to criticize the existence of slavery.

Professor Blackhawk’s new volume attempts to put Native peoples’ stories at the center of the history of the United States.

A short history of a misunderstood literary genre and the world it created.

The lessons of the past for suburban affordable housing advocates.

Carter’s austerity was part of a bigger project. It didn’t really have much to do with environmentalism.

Richard Nixon helped establish Earth Day and poured millions of dollars into conservation, despite his own ambivalence about the environmental movement.

What might Charles Dickens have thought about the American Civil War and the American struggle for abolition and social reforms?

Using oral histories of early East Texas oil workers, recorded in the 1950s, we hear about the chaos and excess that accompanied the discovery of oil.

The story of the oil shocks of 1973 and how they continue to shape the world we live in today.

Called Art War Relief, members from a group of art societies formed a coalition under the auspices of the American Red Cross.

How a historian's family history informed her professional quest to unpack the stories white Southerners told about themselves.

Why some antebellum reformers thought convents were incompatible with "true womanhood."

“The End of History?” was an announcement of victory. But a quarter-century later, its author remains unsure if liberalism truly won.

The Nixon administration saw methadone as a way to reduce crime rather than treat addiction.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" series is the best introduction for a child to virtues indispensable to liberty.

The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it.