Excerpts

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.

Poe’s story of a treasure hunt, revealing the fantastical writer’s hyper-rational penchant for cracking codes.

The congressman is the strongest link in American politics between the early 1960s--the glory days of the civil rights movement--and the 1990s.

Sacagawea is a symbol for everything from Manifest Destiny to women’s rights to American diversity. Except we don't know much about her.

Senator Pat McCarran’s vision for the desert carried a tradition of dispossession into the mid-20th century.

Migration further west began almost immediately after Reconstruction ended, as Black Americans initiated the "Great Exodus" outside the South toward Kansas.

Had Bob Dylan not written a song about it, the 1963 killing of a black servant by a white socialite’s cane might have been long forgotten.

Pat Tillman’s life and death is an all-American story. It’s just not the kind that Donald Trump and his supporters want it to be.

In 1970, Angela Davis was arrested on suspicion of murder. The trial — and her eventual victory — proved to everyone that the justice system was corrupt.

A careful examination of the Privileges or Immunities Clause shows what we lost 150 years ago.

In the 20th century, a moral economy of “whites-only” wealth animated federal policies and programs that created the propertied white middle class.

Colonial currencies and the pan-American origins of the dollar system.

The story of America's oldest counterfeiters and why the Civil War spurred the Secret Service into hunting them down.

Looking for an easy buck, con artists in the early 1900s infamously "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge to immigrants fresh off the boat.

A CIA memo shows that US officials considered his execution a crucial victory—but they were mistaken in believing Che’s ideas could be buried along with his body.

Washington may be the only city on Earth that lobbied itself into existence.

During World War II, almost a half million POWs were interned in the United States, where they forged sympathetic relationships with Black American soldiers.

The Klan dens of the heartland were powerful, vicious, and ambitious. Indiana was their bastion.

Forty years ago, Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff, and a whole host of Texas misfits brought the hippies and rednecks together in outlaw country.

A network of "morale wardens" tracked down the latest scuttlebutt.

“I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” Twain said. “It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.”

Staten Island gets a lot of disrespect from other New Yorkers, some of it fair. But it has its own fascinating people’s history.

The medication abortion decision by a federal judge in Texas focused on the rights of fetuses and the interests of doctors — not the rights of women.

For more than seven decades American roads were dotted with the familiar orange roof and blue cupola of the ubiquitous Howard Johnson’s restaurants and Motor Lodges.

Black Journal interviews with Imamu Amiri Baraka, poet-playwright and co-chairman of the National Black Political Convention.

Past and present celebrities influence on the maintaining of antisemitism.

Samuel Chase was the only Supreme Court justice to be impeached, after he openly campaigned for a president and told jurors who he thought was guilty.

New research adds scientific detail to Indigenous narratives that tell a different story.

The city might have gone up in flames after MLK's assassination, if not for the quick actions of a DJ, a city councilor, and The Hardest Working Man In Show Business.

Spiro Agnew was the progenitor of Trump’s politics. He also resigned from office and accepted a plea deal to avoid jail time.

Despite a seeming absence from the historical record, people who did not conform to traditional gender norms were a part of daily life in the Old West.

What replaced imprisonment for debt was something that has become a mainstay of American life: bankruptcy.

It became the first and only X-rated movie to win a best picture Oscar.

How an idealistic defense intellectual concluded that democracy is often its own worst enemy.

The true economic legacy of the Reagan years is not tax cuts but union busting.

Bikepacking historian Erick Cedeño retraces the Buffalo soldiers' legendary journey from Montana to Missouri to rethink it and its place in American history.

The history of the L.A. Times.

How the utopian notion of the U.S. as a meritocracy became so ingrained in the American psyche.

A new book "examines legal cases of women accused of infanticide and concealment of stillbirth."

For thousands of years, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids along the Mississippi River.

The state GOP's expulsion of legislators Justin Pearson and Justin Jones echoes Georgia's refusal to seat congressman Julian Bond in 1965 for opposing the Vietnam War.

A look into the largely unexplored history of black town-building.

It’s nearly impossible to separate modern-day gun laws from race.

While documented revolts of enslaved persons in New Jersey aren’t abundant, some examples speak to the spirit of resistance among African people held captive.

Debunking claims that news media fueled public disillusionment and cost the US victory.

The humble drinking fountain can tell us much about a society’s attitudes towards health, hygiene, equity, virtue, public goods and civic responsibilities.