Excerpts

University faculty nationwide rebuke Ron DeSantis's recent decision to ban the course from Florida schools.

Christopher Rufo's polemical attacks against Critical Race Theory are not a new phenomenon. Public schools have long been a battlefield for ideological warfare.

Melvyn Leffler’s book on the roots of the Iraq invasion demonstrates the pitfalls of excessive trust in one’s sources, especially when they're top policymakers.

Militia groups have long used Waco as a rallying cry. But it was never the example of whiteness under siege that they invoke.

The untold story of the private equity investors behind Mifeprex—and their escalating legal battle to cash in post-Dobbs.

Instead of using the Underground Railroad as a route north, thousands of enslaved Black people fled to communities in the South.

Lee's life and work suggested that Asian American identity did not possess—and did not need—any underlying reality beyond solidarity.

Hyperindividualism has infiltrated our economic, social, and political landscape.

How the Supreme Court has weaponized the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education against antiracism.

Ambition, insecurity, and the perils of independence.

In the late 19th century, Wells connected lynchings to the economic interests and status anxieties of white southerners.

First-person accounts of those scarred in many ways by the era’s violence suggest Reconstruction did not fail, it was overthrown by violence.

A new book reverses the narrative of the Age of Discovery, which has long evoked the ambitions of Europeans looking to the Americas rather than vice versa.

The argument that corporations have historically been a force for good—and can be again—is wishful thinking.

The roll call for the names of 74 African Americans sold into slavery by Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis was solemn.

The shadow of Samuel Adams, a crafty and government-wary revolutionary, lingers over the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

Which songs will future generations use to characterize the decade?

When the descendants of a 1918 massacre applied for a historical marker, they learned that not everyone wants to remember one of Texas’ darkest days.

Reflecting on Pat Buchanan's legacy.

In the 19th century, food science promised to improve the health, robustness, and productivity of humankind.

At the time, ideas of race in America were quite literally black and white. But a few meters of cloth changed the way some people of color were treated.

The experiences of Michael and Zoharah Simmons show that the fight against the carceral state is embedded in a larger project of building a just world.

Catastrophic accidents at power plants have heightened fears about the safety of nuclear energy, but it's getting renewed attention as a way to fight global warming.

We're born with a hunger for connection with our ancestors – both biological and spiritual.

Decades after its release, the haunted highways and haunted characters of the Boss’s largely acoustic masterpiece still haunt the American psyche.

How the U.S. became a global laggard in chemical regulation.

An 1859 painting by Eastman Johnson depicted enslaved people in a D.C. courtyard. Intended to humanize them, it was coopted by slavery defenders.

Despite their failure to achieve their ultimate goal, the IWW and its resilient members can be examples for the resurgent unions of today.

Official decisions about military intervention and executive power are often based on outdated historical interpretations.

To most 21st century Americans, Hawaii is a tropical paradise. But how that paradise became part of the United States is a long, complex, and often dark story.

A new logistics center in Revere tells a familiar story and poses the question: how inextricable is land use from the land itself?

“National security” and the history of US export controls.

A new history of American politics examines the past and future of political realignments.

By removing Reps. Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy would remove obstacles to his agenda.

When Hollywood went down Argentine way.

The concept of geopolitics comes from German and Russian attempts to explain defeat and reverse loss of influence.

This report clarifies five issues commonly raised in debt limit debates and explores some open questions.

Gene Tong, a popular herbal-medicine doctor in Los Angeles, was hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in American history.

We can’t blame Joe McCarthy for this one. (Though he was a fan.)

Long before monuments to enslavers were removed, lawmakers decided to relocate a scandalous, half-naked depiction of George Washington in a toga.

Similar bars have been marshaled against Central Americans since the late 1980s — severely undermining access to asylum.

The brothers from Barbados who built Negro League stadiums, and community efforts to create historic markers for them.

The unconventional origins of the modern antiwar movement.

The original Los Angeles Chinatown, now known as “Old Chinatown,” developed in the 1860s.

The Biden administration’s expanded use of Title 42 to expel asylum seekers will take a toll.

My mother’s part in the 1970 repeal of New York’s abortion law is a lesson for today’s activists: all politics is local.

Discovery of Phillis Wheatley's earliest known elegy in a commonplace book gives us important insights into her early life and how her work circulated.

A 1940s Red Cross rule, which racially segregated blood, propped up notions of racial difference and Black inferiority.

Netflix’s “The Pale Blue Eye” portrays Edgar Allan Poe as a young West Point cadet. Here’s the true story of his brief, failed military career.

Whole states of the Union owe their very existence to nothing more nation-building than 19th-Century pols’ wanting to add new senators to one side of the aisle.