Excerpts

The story of the 1890 massacre was often about the end of Native American resistance to US expansion. But that’s not how everyone told it.

19th-century African American writer Charles Chesnutt’s subversive literature.

How the unsustainable growth of the container ship industry led to the supply chain crisis.

What degree of legitimacy by voters does a public institution need in a democracy, and how much independence do experts in such an institution need to do their job?

A two-volume biography tracks the life and times of one of Harlem’s leading socialists.

"The Custom of the Country" and its unique relationship with ideas of feminism and the culture of the early 20th century elite.

For its ubiquity and richness, the American library building stands as a reflection of the country’s enlightened calling.

In opulent seaside Newport, a wealthy and beloved Black businessman turns up dead. The resulting trial will tear the town in two.

The story of the girl who grew up in Pasadena, took the bus, loved her mom and grandmother, and wrote herself into the world.

After Texas Rangers and ranchers shot 15 unarmed men and boys in 1918, Porvenir killings were largely forgotten.

This delicious sticky treat has quite the American origin story.

Legend says that the campaign to save abused children in New York was driven by the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The truth is more complicated.

Game theory, computers, the atom bomb—these are just a few of things von Neumann played a role in developing, changing the 20th century for better and worse.

The bonfire was a public spectacle for Black people, as well as any white dissenters. It was a calculated warning.

A catalog of cleanup efforts at the 50-plus sites where uranium was processed for nuclear weapons, where polluted water and sickness were often left behind.

Still’s detailed record of radical abolitionist action remains a model for creating freedom out of community and community out of freedom.

Their plan required not only a social and legal division along racial lines but a political one, too — a separation that persists today.

The Library of Congress has the only complete version of the original 1948 release.

Fuel for the revolution came from a source familiar today: distorted news reports used to drum up enthusiasm for overthrowing an illegitimate government.

Mills exposed postwar American power and warned of an authoritarian turn in the book, which speaks to our own moment of inequality and right-wing anger.

The FBI’s first director built the agency around some of his own worst instincts.

Smith's influence on American politics, and the misunderstanding at the heart of our idea of the "champion of capitalism."

In Chris Herring’s recent history of the New York basketball team, we get a behind-the-scenes look at the sports commentariat’s fixation on grit and toughness.

The railroad company remains a site for Americans to grapple with key questions about the nature of American capitalism.

A 40-year saga of kickbacks, threats, political maneuvering, and the humiliation of Pearl Jam.

The following piece presents an incomplete timeline of the sociological production of the end of the pandemic over the last year.

One of the key changes—pun intended—to the pop charts in the last 60 years is the demise of key changes. What happened?

Jews from the Ottoman Empire pioneered the Christmas lights market a century ago — but nativism, antisemitism and islamophobia obscured this history.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins invented the setting that eventually became Wakanda in her science fiction, but her name isn't widely known.

A researcher delves into the past to tell the story of a relative—falsely accused as a boy of a crime in Jim Crow–era South Carolina.

When struggling with tax enforcement, rich countries have long tried to shift blame to poor countries.

The grass-covered mounds represent 11,000 years of human history.

Published in 1982, 'The Silver Palate Cookbook' taught a generation of American cooks to trust in bold flavors, fresh herbs, and the joys of improvisation.

On this tiny British outpost, conditions of isolation and alcholism mixed with the era's revolutionary fervor to inspire a number of revolts.

Many early stories praise her work ethic and devotion. But with Mrs. Claus usually hitting the North Pole’s glass ceiling, some writers started to push back.

Alexandra Lange's "Meet Me by the Fountain" recovers the forgotten past and the still hopeful future of the American shopping mall.

Isabella Stewart Gardner builds a place to house her art.

Firestone’s racist system of forced labor made Princeton one of the world’s foremost research universities.

Thousands of free-born Black people in the North were kidnapped into slavery through networks that operated as a form of “Reverse Underground Railroad.”

From Bikram yoga to Tae Bo, the 1990s exploded with exoticized consumer fitness products.

Video testimony and evidence presented by the House Select Committee to recommend criminal prosecution of Donald Trump.

A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government.

The Natchez USCT not only contributed to the war effort but was essential to establishing a post-war monument honoring President Lincoln and emancipation.

Sanctions were conceived as an alternative to war. But they may have made the world more violent.

Was Mississippi John Hurt really the first person to sing the tragic tale of Louis Collins?

The first flu children encounter shapes their immune systems. This had a surprising effect on Black and white mortality rates in 1918.

On the rise and fall of the quintessential ’90s online service provider—and a warning about today’s social-media giants.

Research shows the neighborhood you grow up in has profound impact on your future economic success. How did my family's journey across the country impact me?

The fact that most doctors like me don't know how to perform abortions is one of the greatest scandals of contemporary medicine in the US.

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?