Excerpts

Signed February 2, 1848, the treaty compelled Mexico to cede 55 percent of its territory, bringing more than 525,000 square miles under US sovereignty.

Two former CIA officials weigh in: "It's time to call him what he is: 'A liar.'"

Police champions have long wielded new technology as a tool to project authority and legitimacy, while deflecting criticism.

Mushroom clouds, duct tape, Judy Miller, Curveball. Recalling how Americans were sold a bogus case for invasion.

A new history examines Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, the West Coast's settler ideology, and recent turbulence in the world of tech.

It was 1872 and the commander-in-chief kept riding his horse too fast through the streets of Washington.

Émile Coué, a French apothecary, started an “autosuggestion” craze that was the biggest thing in America in the early 1920s, practiced by millions every day.

So where were those angsty kids?

What the political fight over a photo teaches us about the power of art, grassroots activism and images.

How the mythologizing of the Union Army’s Irish Brigade helped dispel anti-Irish sentiment.

The frightening character who appears amid US union disputes can be traced back to a single factory, which wasn’t unionized.

In the 1970s, a family farm movement famously mobilized in “tractorcades” at the Capitol to try to prevent farm foreclosures and keep farmers on the land.

The Los Angeles Times will no longer use "internment" to describe the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

The rise and fall and rise of the traditional St. Patrick's Day meal.

Scholars agree the song, endowed with its deep history of Black pride, speaks to the universal human condition.

If studios can again harness the income from exhibition, we may see a return of traditional vertical integration.

In "The Car," Bryan Appleyard sets out to celebrate the freedom these vehicles granted. But what if they were a dangerous technology from the start?

As environmental rights seem on the verge of a comeback, it’s worth remembering why they once seemed so promising, and why that promise remains unfulfilled.

Nearly 20 years after their deployment to Iraq, veterans grapple with their younger selves and try to make sense of the war.

The same ideas that have harmed D.C. for more than a century are again rearing their ugly head.

A Spanish-language pamphlet by Cotton Mather explodes the Black-versus-white binary that dominates most discussions of race in our time.

Conjugal visits were first allowed as incentives for the forced labor of incarcerated Black men, the practice expanding from there. Is human touch a right?

Archival records of Black southerners' military desertion tribunals can be read as a distinct form of political action.

The new program might strengthen personal connections to refugees, but history shows there are potential downsides, as well.

The unlikely, true story of the Westinghouse “We Can Do It” work-incentive poster that became an international emblem of women’s empowerment.

The Globetrotters have always been far more than just a comic exhibition team, just as sports have always meant much more than escapism.

Seeing through empathy with Diane Arbus.

The man who changed America.

Three recent books examine the discrimination and hypocrisy at the heart of policing “vice.”

A new book about the first lady reveals how she and the ailing President Woodrow Wilson silenced their critics.

How should historians respond to the urgency of this current political moment?

All coed camps can be like this. But Jewish ones were different.

Carter’s work in Zimbabwe forms a significant and underappreciated part of his legacy.

Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book chronicles the tumultuous period leading up to the Mexican Revolution, casting the border as ground zero for continental change.

How a celebrated corporate lawyer named Elihu Root became the driving force behind some of the worst U.S. atrocities ever perpetrated abroad.

The Black Woman’s Organizing Archive highlights work in the 19th and 20th centuries that benefitted Black women and American society as a whole.

Greene probably has visions of suburban Atlanta in the 1990s and 2000s, not the Civil War.

One obvious change occurred at around the turn of the 19th century, when the rapid expansion of the canning industry brought canned pumpkin to every market.

The pecan pie as we know it is very much a twentieth-century creation, so if you ever see a recipe entitled “Old South Pecan Pie,” you know it’s bogus.

Sixty-five years after Russell Lee photographed New Mexico homesteaders coping with the Depression, a Lee admirer visits the town for a fresh slice of life

Neither apples nor the pie originally came from America, but Americans have made this dish their own

Ever since Thoreau headed to Walden, our attention has been wandering.

To demand the freedom to mourn—not on the employer’s schedule, but in our own time—is to reject the cruel rhythms of the capitalist status quo.

Involuntarily committing people with serious mental illness, however well intended, has long served to remove them from society instead of providing treatment.

The right—and wrong—lessons of the Iraq War.

How the institution’s reactionary origins still leak into today’s film culture.

The philosophy that drives the GOP's attacks on government and how it has fueled some of our biggest problems.

A set of revered stone deities stolen from a temple in northwestern India can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking.

News organizations air lies from political figures more often than you’d think, but for very different reasons than Fox News.

A Harvard education professor explains how far we've come in answering some of the most important questions in education since the famous Coleman report.