Excerpts

Marine archaeologists are beginning to understand what really happened to Captain Santa's ill-fated ship, nicknamed the Christmas Tree Boat.

A bold new photographic project asks modern-day Americans to recreate portraits of their 19th-century ancestors in painstakingly accurate fashion.

The 1993 film also inspired its director, Steven Spielberg, to establish a foundation that preserves survivors' stories.

Politicians have often sought to remedy educational panic with remedies that do more harm than good.

How fascists and authoritarians have used antisemitic conspiracy theories to harm Jewish communities and undermine democracy.

The term is 80 years old. Everyone is still fighting over its meaning.

The troubled history of the famous poinsettia plant.

Wednesday night will bring a brilliant meteor shower, but the far bigger Leonid shower 190 years ago had people believing Judgment Day was at hand.

An agency spokesperson claimed that the move had nothing to do with politics. Internal emails show otherwise.

Controversial artworks are flashpoints when artistic freedom and religious sensitivities collide.

The effects of the 1991 mass shooting at a Luby's in Killeen can still be felt today—in the legislature and on our streets.

In 1950, the Sullivinian Institute was created to push the boundaries of psychoanalysis. By 1980, its therapists and patients had become a small paramilitary.

A microsyllabus on the history of the U.S.-Mexico border, refugees, and deportation.

Fulbright created an exchange program which sends Americans abroad and advances international engagement and mutual understanding. Yet it’s not his only legacy.

The Kingdom of the Happy Land represents just one of many Black placemaking efforts in Appalachia. We must not forget it.

On December 11, 1981, El Salvador’s US-backed soldiers carried out one of the worst massacres in the history of the Americas at El Mozote.

While many Americans gushed about the effectiveness of the ‘Destruction of the Tea,’ others thought it went too far.

California cannabis breeding is at a crossroads.

Judge the author of the “Feminine Mystique” not by the gains she made, but by her experience.

The law, passed in a frenzy after the First World War, is a disaster. Why is it still on the books?

America’s feminists felt confident when the Equal Rights Amendment was put before Congress 100 years ago this week. For a century, it’s failed to be enacted.

An unlikely alliance in antebellum America.

A search for the memory of R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia.

Linoleum has a rich history in art and industry that you should remember next time you walk across a particularly beautiful patterned floor.

When keeping cultural archives safe means stepping outside the law.

The first barbed wire border fences were proposed to keep out Chinese migrants. They’ve been debated for over a century.

How Newt Gingrich laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's rise.

AM stations mainly wanted to keep listeners engaged—but ended up remaking the Republican Party.

The cosmic collision of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway.

Leadership battles tell us a lot about where a party is headed.

No rap album has quite the mythology attached to it—as a game changer, a king maker, a genre expander. But legends aren’t exactly fact.

The far-flung tale of a murder song.

Jefferson's vision of the family farm is a myth that won't die.

The story of Norma Rae, based on the union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton.

The War on Poverty comes to life in a new book that explores how welfare mothers in Las Vegas built an organizing juggernaut that transformed lives.

The fight for a dignified space to carry out the most basic of human functions was popular when 19th-century Progressives took it on. It's time to take up that fight again.

Following the rhythm of Shirley Horn.

Women’s work is often hidden or marginal within historical records that were meant to show men’s economic and political lives.

There once was a time when Yom Kippur was a time to eat, drink, and be merry.

How the failed search for a silent film uncovered a lost musician of the Harlem Renaissance.

America has been declaring war on Black education since this country’s beginnings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Stop Woke Act seeks to continue this tradition.

The U.S. sought to rebrand nuclear power as a source of peace, but this message helped mask a violent history.

How the alienated margins arrived at the center of American politics.

The editors of a new book talk about the history of the Indiana facility — written by people who were held there almost 150 years later.

Even if her husband was a murderer, a woman in a bad marriage once had few options. Unless she fled to South Dakota.

The relationship between two true believers in American exceptionalism.

A look into the life, art, and "wildness" of influential choreographer Martha Graham.

The university’s Peabody Museum exploited loopholes to prevent repatriation to the Wabanaki people while still staying in compliance with NAGPRA.

Did the 2010 Tea Party Movement really have anything in common with 1773? What did the history of populism suggest about the Tea Party's future?

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union was founded on the principle of interracial organizing.