Excerpts

Considering the suppressed legacy of Claude McKay’s two “lost” novels, “Amiable with Big Teeth” and “Romance in Marseille.”

The 1619 Project claimed to reveal the unknown history of slavery. It ended up helping to distort the real history of slavery and the struggle against it.

Anthem for a forgotten cohort.

As long as the U.S. system privileges private property, thousands of acres of public lands will remain off limits.

How William Cooper envisioned a web entangling global capitalism, the government, and UFOs, and incubated the politics of conspiracy.

Oppenheimer and the demon heart of power.

Once considered a relic of moral panics past, the 1873 law criminalized sending "obscene, lewd or lascivious" materials through the mail.

Unveiling the conflict and consequences in Kirkwood's expansion.

And how those with few resources at their disposal found ways to navigate and negotiate even the direst of situations.

Nazis play a key role as villain in American collective consciousness—but without broad understanding of antisemitism.

Reexamining biases and injustices that the New England Journal of Medicine has historically helped to perpetuate.

Critiques of the Thirteenth Amendment have roots in a long history of activists who understood the imprisonment of Black people as a type of slavery.

During the Civil War, women secretly enlisted as men in the Union Army. No one suspected a thing...until they gave birth.

One man’s archive of a vanished culture.

An in-depth look at horse breeding.

The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?

The 14th Amendment offers a remedy that is both simpler and likelier to work.

Former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s extraordinary memoir recalls painful memories for her--and me.

Despite Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, a Colorado state judge stretches the word “officer,” permitting him to remain on the state’s ballot.

Our first three years are usually a blur and we don’t remember much before age seven. What are we hiding from ourselves?

The complex history, career, and legacy of one of America's most popular speakers and reformers.

A new biography examines the life and times of the pioneering activist, abolitionist, and writer.

When the organization first defended Nazis, it did so for practical reasons.

See how Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore and Thomas Nast made Santa the merriest man in Manhattan.

The Smithsonian museum’s collection of human remains contains dozens of brains from vulnerable Washington, D.C., residents, many taken without consent.

Many servicemen became addicted to opioids prescribed during the war. Society viewed their dependency as a lack of manliness.

How the resignation of a Carter era ambassador still echoes today.

"Big Mama" does what all blues greats do: she telegraphs endurance and force to whomever out there in TV land might need it. This is blues perfection.

On the terror that filled the void left by the retreat of federal authority in the South.

For 70 years, the U.S. has failed to achieve faster trains—because it refuses to do what it takes to make them work.

Though his younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer eventually eclipsed him, Israel Joshua Singer excelled at showing characters buffeted by the tides of history.

The Navy’s operations against Barbary corsairs at the start of the 19th century provide salient lessons for operating in the gray zone today.

Retro was not the antithesis to the sub- and countercultural experiments of the 1960s, it grew directly out of them.

Among America's political elite, 5 living presidents, 2 Supreme Court justices, 11 governors, and 100 legislators have ancestors who enslaved Black people.

Most of the Klan’s victims were African American, but many other groups have been targeted during the hate group’s century and a half of history.

The flag of Bikini Atoll looks a lot like the American flag. It has the same red and white stripes. The resemblance is intentional.

What the tech pioneer can, and can’t, teach us.

Confronting segregation as Black urbanites' fight for access and equality in northern cinemas.

In "Ordinary Notes," Sharpe considers Black culture “in all of its shade and depth and glow.”

What were Americans' immediate responses to "A Christmas Carol," and how did Dickens' reading tours and eventual death reshape its meaning?

Even as the civil rights revolution brought significant gains to Black residents of cities, the story was very different in rural places.

Who wants to watch a show whose characters never make real moral choices?

New analysis confirms precolonial lineage of this extinct breed, once kept for their wool.

Contrary to popular belief, the 1773 protest opposed a tax break, not a tax hike. And it didn't immediately unify the colonies against the British.

What roiled the mind of Nebraska poet John Neihardt with whom Black Elk, the iconic Lakota holy man, shared his story?

For a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

The Exorcist in 1973 and 2023.

This new biopic about the socialist organizer Bayard Rustin stops at the March on Washington. What is it leaving out?

Opposition to British policy was justified. Destroying 342 crates of tea worth nearly $2 million in today’s money wasn’t.

Attacks on private property enraged Colonial leaders and the British public, hardening positions and ruling out compromise.