Excerpts

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.

The US is not Yugoslavia, but its struggles surrounding pluralism, nationalism, and an urban/rural divide parallel those Yugoslavia faced as it descended into chaos.

A new interactive digital project recovers biographies of women in science, and recreates the social networks that were essential to sustaining their work.

Descendants of the west Africans who picked the cotton that made Manchester rich are struggling to keep their distinct culture alive.

When the smoke cleared in D.C. following the 1968 riots after the assasination of MLK, the city's black communities organized to rebuild a more equitable city.

Proposal advice from Inez Milholland, originally published in the Chicago Day Book, 1916.

This syllabus lays groundwork for making questions of race and racism central to studying the histories of medicine and science.

A sharp uptick in challenges to U.S. antidiscrimination laws threatens decades of progress in extending civil rights to all.

Union soldiers improvised a Passover celebration near what's now Fayetteville, W.Va. They're being honored with a sign at the approximate site.

The rash ruse was central to Nixon’s strategy to fight the Cold War, and can also tell us a good deal about the famously elusive ex-president himself.

Lacy M. Johnson walks through a nature center near Houston that has reclaimed the land where a neighborhood, sunken by oil extraction and floodwater, once stood.

How a struggling entrepreneur in Ohio saved his burger business during Lent and changed the McDonald's menu for good.

Hint: the Puritans were involved.

How Robert Segovia used steelworkers and the Catholic Church to build a political machine in Chicago.

A teenage girl died by suicide after she started menstruating and not knowing what it was, in 1935. A bill in Florida wants to take us back to those times.

Competition over eggs on the Farallon Islands in the midst of the California Gold Rush in San Francisco led to an all out war between eggers.

The fortunes of Coney Island have waxed and waned, but in the early twentieth century, its amusement parks became a major American export.

Dean Calbreath’s biography, “The Sergeant,” relates the improbable adventures of a brilliant 19th-century Black man.