Excerpts

The Supreme Court has watered down the policy’s core justification: justice.

A new history of the environmental movement places too much emphasis on famous figures like Rachel Carson and shies away from confronting failures.

The House speaker fight was eerily reminiscent of 1923 — but the differences between the two will drive what comes next.

The album was once king. Now it’s the live show.

Mr. Shakespeare's team oversaw ads and on-air events that reflected the rising power of television as a political tool.

If fact-checking could fix us, we’d be a utopia by now.

A new book examines military manuals as a genre to understand what armed counter-revolutionaries think of as the right way to do what they do.

The Pointer Sisters, the Great Migration, and the soul of country.

The Framers would have never tolerated debt-limit brinkmanship. It’s time to put this terrible idea on trial.

Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas. That’s good science, and here’s why.

A century ago, a false accusation sparked the destruction of the Florida community.

The history of speakership contests underscores the corner Kevin McCarthy is painted into and the corner any Republican House leader is likely to face.

The battle is worth winning for Kevin McCarthy — and could reshape the Republican Party.

One hundred years ago, a strong leader brought House rebels to the table to elect a speaker. Can McCarthy do the same?

When historians concede to discuss the past with the terms of the present, they abandon the skill set that makes them historians.

Restoring the term “burnout” to its roots in landlord arson puts the dispossession of poor city dwellers at its center.

Gregory Ain wanted to create social housing in Los Angeles. Dogged by the FBI, his hope for more egalitarian architecture never came to be.

Segregation, separatism, and the history of black barbershops.

Kevin McCarthy's struggling bid to win the speakership has nothing on the epic 1856 contest that pitted abolitionists against proslavery members of Congress.

The tendency to divorce racial disparities from economic inequality has a long liberal lineage.

In Jill Lepore's "These Truths," ideas produce other ideas. But new ideas arise from thinking humans, not from other ideas.

The sight of the flag on January 6, 2021 has aroused curiosity and criticism. Missing, however, is the multiplicity of its symbolism to Vietnamese Americans.

Syracuse University Geography professor Matt Huber discusses the 1930s oil boom in the American southwest, and the military might brought in to control it.

160 years ago, a similarly fractured GOP took months to settle on a speaker.

On the value of the discipline and its applications.

When the federal government began to claim a stake in the public’s physical fitness, and the origins of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.

Or maybe it was the cigars that gave us this New Year's Eve staple.

Jedediah Purdy's new book examines why the U.S. has continuously failed to qualify as a system defined by popular rule.

Largely forgotten today, Albion W. Tourgée’s legislation could have prevented Moore v. Harper.

After 110 years, a look at the benefits — and drawbacks — to expanding the chamber.

An argument against looking at our past through the lens of today.

The prospect of removing people from communities to be put in institutions has been a project of social control.

In football, prayer is—and has always been—political.

Nearly one hundred years before enslaved African arrived in Jamestown, the Spanish brought 100 slaves to the coast of what is now Georgia or South Carolina.

Connecting the Haitian Revolution and abolition in the 1834 Tennessee Constitutional Convention.

Conservatives’ veneration for the founders opens the door for a secular vision for America’s public schools.

Why are Chicago’s race riots of 1919 overlooked in the city’s collective memory? A new project tells the stories of the 38 killed, and the legacy of racism in the U.S.

The sudden ubiquity of sportswear might seem a little odd. But almost every feature of modern fashion was once adapted from athletics.

Why are Georgia peaches so iconic? The answer has a lot to do with slavery — its end and a need for the South to rebrand itself.

A music critic assesses Elvis Presley's influence on popular culture.

The increasingly militant right supports the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.

A brief history of theater fires in New York City—and the regulations that helped people escape them.

At the frontier of American empire.

The tale of the long forgotten Joseph Jefferson, who revolutionized character acting in 19th century American theater.

Liberians in West Fargo trying to dodge racism are deeply woven into American history.

A Washington Post investigation of more than 400 artworks in the U.S. Capitol building found that one-third honor enslavers or Confederates.

During the heyday of the Chicano Movement, school walkouts were organized to disrupt what activists called “the ongoing mis-education of Chicano students.”

On the laughing emptiness at the center of the Republican Party.

Manhattan Project physicist was infamously stripped of his security clearance in 1954.

Lessons from the start of the Cold War.