Excerpts

The political preacher who made the religion look bad.

The government responded with ruthless persecution — just one egregious example in the NSA’s long, sordid history of fiercely guarding its secrecy.

Two new books reveal the story of Stanford University’s early years to be rife with corruption, autocracy, incompetence, white supremacy, and murder.

"I thought, surely after the success of 'Sesame Street' and my contribution to it, all kinds of Latinx talent would flood the media. Not so."

A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it.

“Queer” has experienced a loss of meaning and a curdling of political potential. To reinvigorate it, we need a new approach to history.

Should museums only exhibit work of their own culture, or should they bring the world to visitors?

The man behind an iconic Vietnam War image captured ‘the ugliest events of our time.'

The wildfire haze reminded some of the 1966 "killer smog" that wrapped New York in a toxic cloud. A woman recalled how her dad built a machine to save her mom.

Trans people have existed since the dawn of time. The internet has not.

The National Genealogical Society is one of the oldest, largest groups dedicated to helping families trace their ancestries.

The Fifth Amendment allows the government to buy private property for the public good. "Public good" being the expansion of white neighborhoods.

This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region.

Democratic socialists attending the 2020 Democratic Convention won’t be out of place in a city with a long history of socialist governance.

Images were important in defining the Republic between the Revolution and the Civil War and they distinctively both did and did not show Americans in need.

If labor organizers learned anything from decades of small victories and stubborn failures in the U.S. South, it was that interracial unions were hard work.

Obama’s official oral history contains new evidence of his indifference and foot-dragging on the most important issue of our time.

The recent documentary "The US and the Holocaust" is a scathing, even bombastic indictment of US immigration policy over the past 160 years.

An effort to memorialize the homestead of one of Oregon’s first Black farmers illuminates the land’s complicated history.

The unity of two long-neglected communities during trying times is a reminder of what we desperately need in Los Angeles.

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.

How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?

The Reagan administration thought Surgeon General C. Everett Koop would put his faith above public health. Instead, Koop sent all Americans a mailer on AIDS.

The view from nowhere came from somewhere.

The argument made recently by Kim Forde-Mazrui may not be in good faith, but it does raise important questions about the meaning of the Constitution.

The genocide of Native Americans was nowhere more methodically savage than in California. A new state initiative seeks to reckon with this history.

Social movements that have pushed for inclusion and equality in the South have often evaded or ignored the issue of Native land and sovereignty.

Two decades passed before the ghosts of the Rosenbergs came back to haunt Irving Kaufman, the judge who sentenced them to death.

“Transgender” has gone from an umbrella term for different behaviors, to an umbrella term for different identities.

Likely the child of Martha's son from her first marriage, William Costin used his position to advocate for D.C.'s free Black community.

Botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter braved rapids and steep cliffs to catalog numerous plant species.

“Forced labor” conflates different forms of labor throughout history and minimizes the uniquely brutal conditions of chattel slavery.

The rediscovery of demos performed by the songwriters of the legendary Memphis recording studio reveals a hidden history of soul.

The roots of anti-gay attitudes lay in white supremacy.

The war marked a sea change in how black men viewed their own citizenship.

Live entertainment, all genders and straight people are back—and were here in the beginning

How an autism diagnosis became both a clinical label and an identity; a stigma to be challenged and a status to be embraced.

A story of a mistaken identity reveals a lot about the history of black women in America, the challenges of understanding the past, and who we are today.

They called her ACM, but never, ever, to her face.

Breakfast cereal, dietary purity, and race.

To appreciate who Whitman was, we have to reinterpret the poet in ways that have made generations of critical gatekeepers uncomfortable.

When Silent Spring was published, the response was overtly gendered. Rachel Carson's critics depicted her as hysterical, mystical, and witchy.

The expulsion of two Black lawmakers from the Tennessee House recalls an earlier expulsion of dozens of Black lawmakers from Georgia's General Assembly.

If Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had his way, the state’s past of lynching Blacks would be taught as an exception rather than the rule. History tells a different story.

Isaac Murphy was once called ‘The Prince of Jockeys’ during the fleeting era when African Americans reigned on the nation’s racetracks.

The heart of this book is the sharp and disjointed accounts of survivors, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise.

In the late Sixties, countercultural media was distributed by the Underground Press Syndicate and bankrolled by marijuana.

More than 50 years after the Stonewall uprising marked the birth of a movement for LGBTQ+ rights, transgender activists continue to push for inclusion.

On Chuck Berry.

The Supreme Court Justice's defense of Plessy v. Ferguson in a 1993 memo continues to influence the court's interpretation of the 14th amendment.