Excerpts

“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.

How digital media pursued viral traffic at all costs and unleashed chaos.

How the Source Family, a radical 1970s utopian commune, still impacts what we eat today.

In the early 1900s heyday of the Socialist Party, Texas boasted a vibrant state party that attracted oppressed farmers in droves.

Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.

After the Spanish conquest, horses transformed Native American tribes much earlier than historians thought.

A mass murderer of 1955.

Jefferson’s system depended on shoring up the bulwarks of race and basing the law on a theory of government that withdrew protection from unfavored groups.

Lincoln's understanding of the preconditions for genuine democracy, and of its necessity, were rooted in this rich soil. And with his help, ours could be, too.

Gardner's public service did not end with her lifelong advocacy for women's equality, but continued even after her death.

How Black women used exercise to achieve civic goals in the late nineteenth century.

While other explorers may claim credit for discovering the North Pole, an unsung and largely forgotten former sharecropper has as good a case as anyone.

Efforts to pinpoint early cases have been complicated, and in some cases compromised, by distractions and diversions.

Native peoples face similar struggles with the federal governments in the U.S. and in Canada.

Though their wishes were often overshadowed, soldier-patients had voices.

In Candyman, the notorious Cabrini-Green complex is haunted by urban myths and racial paranoia.

A generation is still dying younger than it should—this time, of “natural causes.”

The historical record says we shouldn’t be surprised.

A food writer's reminiscences of local cuisine in the springtime.

It’s difficult to read the gender of children in many old photos. That’s because coding American children via clothing didn’t begin until the 1920s.

Calamanco footwear was sturdy, egalitarian, and made in the U.S.A.

The railroad baron and governor of California was starkly contradictory and infamously disruptive.

Mack McCormick’s long, tortured quest to find the real Robert Johnson.

After Emancipation, Black people fought for public benefits like pensions that would make their newly won citizenship meaningful.

What the Medicine Wheel, an indigenous American model of time, shows about apocalypse.

In Joshua Bennett’s history of spoken word, poetry is alive and well thanks to a movement that began in living rooms and bars.

Domestic glass manufacturing in the U.S. remains concentrated in the Rust Belt. But studio glassblowing is adding relevance to a long forgotten material.

An unprepossessing townhouse in the East Village has been central to a series of distinctive events in New York City history.

Exploring recent debates about the uses–and utility–of Black history in both the academic and public spheres.

One of the cases on which the judge relies said the opposite of what he claims it did.

In northern Louisiana, white supremacists slaughtered 150 African Americans, brutally thwarting their hopes for autonomy and self-governance.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk rationalized his medication abortion opinion through a distorted reading of the long-dormant 1873 law.

Targeted even when unarmed, around 70 percent of the Black Union troops who fought in the 1864 battle died as a result of the clash.

Anthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of art and sex, is suddenly relevant again thanks to Donald Trump’s worst judge.

Thirty years later, an avoidable tragedy has spawned a politically ascendant mythology.

A far right politics that developed in the middle of the 20th century has prevented Democrats from gaining as they have in suburbs elsewhere.

A conversation with some of the hottest filmmakers on the scene: They're young, they're Black, but they're making green.

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.

A new book chronicles the decades-long fight to legalize abortion in the United States.

Why the Exodus must remain central to the African American church.

With the Comstock Act of 1873 coming back to life, reproductive care, LGBTQ protections, and a host of other civil rights are now at risk.

America’s classification crisis.

Once a key element in Native economies of the region, clams and oysters became a reliable source of free protein for working-class and poor urban dwellers.

Our own world is built from copper, and so too will future worlds be.

From the 1920s-1940s, North, West, and South Philadelphia saw its Black population increase by 50-80% as white flight occurred.

Children’s entertainment always embodies local values.

Aaron Burr spoke of far-flung fortune, and then the Blennerhassetts’ West Virginia Eden went up in flames.