Excerpts

On the meaning and use of rivers and other waterways.

Following the careers of a family of especially corrupt border control officials.

From the tomato to the hamburger bun, the invention has transformed not just what we eat but taste itself.

In the wake of the 1964 Harlem riots, June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s plan to redesign the neighborhood suggested new possibilities for urban life.

On the construction of America's new capital city.

A story of math and political stasis.

In 1936, the Czech track star Zdeněk Koubek became world-famous after undergoing surgery so that he could live openly as a man.

For generations of American radicals, the path to liberation required a new constitution, not forced removal.

When he reflected on the consequences of empire, Conrad saw no logic or teleology. He saw mayhem. There is no surety in "Heart of Darkness."

Waiting for the start of the American Civil War in Canada and the Caribbean.

Abolitionist and writer John Swanson Jacobs on reclaiming liberty in a land of unfreedom.

How James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others embraced a new Black humanism.

On the fragile facade of republicanism in 19th century America.

When labor found a common cause — and enemy — with the abolition movement.

During the first decade of the New Deal, modernist architects designed schools for disabled children that proposed radical visions of civic care.

Researching the Sandinista Revolution from Nicaraguans’ perspective.

What happened in 1970 after Richard Nixon was told, “I doubt that there would be any problem of student demonstrations in Tennessee.”

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.

When I moved to Lower Manhattan in 1967, I decided to make a picture of every building in the neighbourhood before the city knocked it down.

On museum ethics and animal welfare in 19th century America.

On the continuing regime of racial terror in the post-Civil War American South.

The story of an incident that may have been the first time the issue of race was ever addressed on a baseball field in the Carolinas.

In which “the intellectual handmaidens of the capitalists” are taken to task.

A second-generation immigrant, Hazel Ying Lee was the first Chinese American woman to receive her pilot's license.

A quarter century on, the school shooters’ mythology has propagated a sprawling subculture that idolizes murder and mayhem.

A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.

Connie B. Gay and the roots of country music militarization.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s struggle against polio transformed him into the man who led the country through the Great Depression and World War II.

Allison Rudnick on the rise and fall of the 19th century "Literary Poster."

During the Little Ice Age, Native North Americans devised whole new economic, social, and political structures.

The untold story of the Wide Awakes, the young Americans who took up the torch for their antislavery cause and stirred the nation.

“We await our moment, in pursuit of the picture that Corky envisaged, a portrait of a community that is too large and too brilliant.”

From a 1915 suffragist road trip to the “First Lady of Drag Racing.”

The erased histories of the communities that built Seattle.

The early years of a future basketball icon.

In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly reinvented themselves.

Female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds fought to tell their own stories.

Meditating on blotter not just as art, or as a historical artifact, but as a kind of media, even a “meta medium.”

Remembering the river helps me forget, at least for a moment, the challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy I experienced in my childhood.

How a 1960s interspecies communication experiment went haywire.

On the inseparable histories of matrimony and disunion in the United States.

The creators of Yale’s Civil War Memorial were more concerned with honoring “both sides” than with the true meaning of the war.

The President's spiritual journey transformed him and the nation.

A document in her papers in the Library of Congress sheds new light on postwar research on psychedelics.

A detailed look on Abraham Lincoln's political philosophy on slavery, ownership, and freedom.

The recent history of copyright in music cannot be separated from the rise of technologies for the recording and transmission of content online.

A front-row seat to a slow-moving catastrophe. How tech both helps and hurts our world.

One woman’s crusade for democratic participation and political efficacy in the face of powerful institutions.

How a mid-century architecture competition reimagined the American home.

My research shows that this tradition runs deep.