Excerpts

Were the Knights of the Golden Circle responsible for Lincoln’s assassination? No one knows, but far-right secret societies always draw power from speculation.

The U.S. faces the likelihood of a bruising and raucous set of confirmation hearings — a clear break from the cooperative system the founders established.

Anita Bryant’s legacy is not what she hoped—but her destructive message lives on.

A new theory of the leisure class influencer.

Rap beef is form of capitalist accumulation that enriches artists—and, most of all, the corporate suits that run their record labels.

Which public figures impacted baby naming trends?

How a lively market on Boston Harbor became part of many defining moments of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras.

Throughout its history, the vast Arctic island has been viewed by competing powers as a strategic prize and geopolitical asset.

The Constitution is absolutely clear on this point, but will that matter?

Even Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship has a historical link to the Chinese American experience.

Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett each had a different vision of reproductive freedom. Would reproductive rights be more secure if Dennett’s had prevailed?

In every generation, charlatans come along with a plan to make education better by spending less money on schools.

A newly released classified document shows that the National Security Agency knew Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy—and that the government executed her anyway.

Grover Cleveland enthusiasts aren’t thrilled that Donald Trump won a nonconsecutive presidential term.

Despite Chalamet’s best efforts, "A Complete Unknown" is a cookie-cutter Bob Dylan biopic for a legendary artist who deserves something more interesting.

As an individual, Jimmy Carter stood as a rebuke to our venal and heartless political class. As a politician, his private virtues proved to be public vices.

Humans love to imagine their own demise.

For all of his personal Christian devotion, he could not capture the hearts of white evangelicals.

Jimmy Carter, skeptical of NASA's shuttle, saved it with funding despite delays and opposition. His Voyager message carries hope deep into space.

The Baptist Georgia governor won evangelical Christian voters in the 1976 presidential election. Next time around, those voters changed sides—for the long haul.

At 50, the game is more popular than ever, but its core appeal is still a great secret.

Highest-level national security documents reveal a tough-minded, detail-oriented president.

As President, he told us that we needed to shift to solar power. We should have listened to him then.

He tackled segregation in the nation’s public colleges and fraud in student-aid programs, and established the Department of Education.

As a worker in the 1970s, I looked forward to a Jimmy Carter administration. By the end of his term in office, I felt betrayed.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, gave visibility to devastating health problems that are often invisible.

His unwillingness to take a radical stance forced him to respond to events by imposing austerity and doing little to strengthen labor.

Jimmy Carter is associated with an idealistic “human rights agenda.” In reality, he was paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism.

Tim LaHaye bridged Reagan-era anti-Communism to today’s Christian Nationalism, opposing humanism, evolution, and secularism, emphasizing biblical morality.

Common conceptions of Carter are all wrong because they don’t acknowledge a crucial reality: he was a conservative.

Trump’s canal comments resurrect a forgotten American interest.

There’s a reason the 39th president is still revered by former Soviet dissidents.

The Southern president, who kept his head down following Brown v. Board of Education, would eventually declare that “the time for discrimination is over.”

In Black Southern life, guns have been a sign of readiness against constant threats.

Karen Silkwood death and smear campaign highlights how retaliation against whistleblowers deflects scrutiny from power by targeting the messenger.

A fascinating new exhibit focuses on Baldwin’s years in Turkey, the country that, in his words, saved his life.

Nixon was quietly vindicated by the Supreme Court in its Trump v. United States. A half-century later, the Supreme Court made clear that he was right all along.

What’s going on here, and are we ever going to talk about it?

The question that remains at the end of the book concerns the meaning of “progressive” within an evangelical Christian church.

While America was fighting on the ground, the Federation was fighting in space.

Tamara Thomsen discovered a 1,200-year-old dugout canoe in Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota in 2021, spurring efforts to catalog historic canoes statewide.

The Bob Dylan film forefronts a conflict between acoustic and electric music, while ignoring how the Vietnam War divided folk musicians.

What kind of Christmas did we used to know? To hear some critics and historians tell it, the holiday used to be a lot more religious than it is now.

The 1946 elections were a disaster for Democrats—and the reason I was born.

Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein has cultivated a reputation as a well-meaning advocate of history education. What does that image mask?

History also changes because of strange, flawed, deeply human people doing unremarkable, tedious, and often boring work.

In 1973, the Christmas Bird Count formed the basis for a press freedom case that centered on the impacts of DDT.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s declaration of martial law is of little import compared to the American occupation of the country.

This remarkably prescient document holds several lessons about how to run foreign policy.

The Washington Post has found more than three times as many deaths as the U.S. government documented in its investigation of Indian boarding schools.