Excerpts

On the scholarship and intellectual legacies of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, William Dunning and other academics.

Who decides how history gets written?

In 1885, white rioters murdered dozens of their Asian neighbors in Rock Springs, Wyoming. 140 years later, the story of the atrocity is still being unearthed.

Was the pro wrestler known as “the Cuban Wonder” really the first Black world champion?

On the early career of the actor-cum-politician who changed America.

Video games, violence and the enduring allure of the vigilante hero.

The scene at the 1964 Republican National Convention, when Barry Goldwater was nominated and black Republicans’ worst fears about their party were confirmed.

If world leaders had been clearer about the sanctions Putin would face, they might have deterred his invasion of Ukraine.

The Puritan origins of modern ideas about migration.

In the summer of 1842, young Abraham Lincoln’s razor-sharp wit almost got him into a whole heap of trouble.

Video has become our dominant cultural medium, yet we lack reliable archives for the audiovisual record.

How historians changed their approach, from the 1960s to the present.

The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.

On Pierrepoint B. Noyes, H.G. Wells, and the “Superweapons” of early science-fiction.

Levity and play — eerily combined with anxiety, terror, and deadly violence — shaped the identity and image of Early Republic militias.

And why so many people remember the tale so differently.

On the ongoing legal struggle for educational and racial equality across the United States.

In the 1970s, a crop of books purporting to provide a scientific basis for gender inequality met sharp criticism from figures like Gould.

On John Huggins, Angela Y. Davis, and the complex history of an oft-misunderstood political movement.

When the 1930 Hays Code banned pregnancy in film, birds took over the business of birth.

The ruling class used false claims about white women’s sexual virtue to regulate sexuality. But the “white slavery” panic was also about race, class and labor.

At universities, American Marxism has led to good scholarship, but it’s also encouraged hyper-specialization and the use of impenetrable jargon.

Why rock overtook every other genre to define our understanding of America at war.

Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned.

Using film and advertising to sell capitalism and nationalism to immigrants in the early 20th century.

The postwar moment of a distinctive new American novel—Nabokov’s "Lolita"— is also the moment in which William Faulkner finally gained recognition.

Fire!! was a pathbreaking showcase for Black artists and writers “ready to emotionally serve a new day and a new generation.”

On the rise of the narcotic farm model, a radical reimagining of the nation’s approach to addiction.

On Robert Moses, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the culture of environmental waste.

The story of how Ed Carnes became a judge offers crucial lessons for those who hope to unwind the policies of mass incarceration.

In Wilson’s chivalric framework, women were required to be submissive precisely so that men could protect the weaker sex.

A new Smithsonian book reckons with the enduring legacies of slavery and capitalism.

On the lengths newspaper publishers took to reach new subscribers — and then drive them away — in the 1930s.

Margaret Fuller and the first major work of American feminism.

A reading from 1920 on the fights that follow the 19th Amendment: “Now at last we can begin.”

Campus speech debates reveal a history of distorted narratives, balancing free speech, moral standards, and generational conflicts in U.S. universities.

The popular reception of thongs, bras, boy shorts and other intimate items.

Considering the impact of the 1959 earthquake that shook our most famous national park.

Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.

The Black Legion was a white supremacist fascist group headquartered in Lima, Ohio. Its worst deeds are lost to memory, but they shouldn’t be.

On the origins of America's hegemonic foreign policy.

“Mary Mallon was a cook. And her story, first and foremost, is the story of a cook.”

A narrative not of brain drain but of Black aspiration.

When video games went mainstream, the Pentagon realized their potential as a promotional tool, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on war-based games.

Remembering the lead-up to the 1979 Greensboro Massacre.

In which John B. Calhoun begins to study the lifestyles of rodents, and the public listens.

On the transatlantic development of pilsners and lagers from Central Europe to the Americas.

The same legal and cultural struggles will await the next critical infrastructural technology, and the next.

Progressive forces in US labor took a stand in solidarity with trade unionists facing murderous repression in El Salvador.

The systematic post-war displacement of communities of color.