Excerpts

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton may be titans of the American Founding, but these two poles don't describe everything.

Trump has reinvented Reagan’s old attack, with one key twist.

From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is trying to create a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity.

A new history examines the long history of a radical and sometimes conservative concept.

The Early Republic’s maritime jurisprudence is even more relevant given the immense power of the modern executive.

The very American story of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance.

Exploring the intersection of family history with the rise of the religious right.

A culture clash driven by finances and Old World alignments had the Big Apple contemplating leaving the Union. The Civil War ended that.

Washington believed that civility toward other nations was a strategy to preserve independence, not a concession.

As the war over American social studies classrooms heats up, the curriculum is in the crosshairs.

Po'pay, a Tewa religious leader, led the Pueblo Revolt, the most successful Indigenous rebellion in what’s now the United States.

A new book recounts diverse opinions among US foreign policy intellectuals during the Korean War.

Chronicling the experience of a teenage soldier during the Revolutionary War.

Trump has upended a long tradition of claiming, however hypocritically, that foreign intervention is not about power or profit.

The attack on Venezuela and abduction of Maduro surprised everyone, except oil companies. It's not the first time the U.S. was motivated by corporate interests.

The standard story of 1960s art is one of Abstract Expressionism leading into Pop Art and minimalism. The Whitney offers a different one centered on surrealism.

The Trump administration’s erasure of Indigenous history serves a larger project—yet another plunder of land.

New evidence helps resolve enduring mysteries about a 1758 incident that nearly cost the future president his life—and shaped his views on the battles to come.

What we learn by tracing rebellions from Africa to the Americas.

In "Make Your Own Job," Erik Baker shows just how long Americans have scrambled to pile work on top of work—and at what cost.

His invasion of Venezuela and abduction of Nicolás Maduro recall U.S. imperialism of the early twentieth century—and may similarly lead to global catastrophe.

By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.

Donald Trump is once again threatening war with Iran just six months after bombing the Islamic Republic in June.

A visual archive of Jan. 6, 2021, through the lenses of those who were there.

A scholar of international law on the implications of the U.S. arrest of President Nicolás Maduro.

How American history has valorized a draw.

The physicist fought for the promise of a diverse, meritocratic America. We need his optimism today.

Virtues we now aspire to were once habits people vowed to quit.

When I look at Mamdani, I don’t see some radical departure. I see him as an heir to the Yiddish socialism that helped build New York.

A historical reconstruction of the Big Apple’s crime decline, told from inside the institutions responsible for public safety.

Before Donald Trump's takeover proposal for Gaza, another New York real estate magnate had his own plans for the region.

Reports on the May 1960 downing of an American U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union offer a case study in Cold War posturing and misdirection.

Kitzmiller 20 years on.

Crumb's work was called sexist, racist, and obscene, but even his critics often acknowledged that he was hilarious and original.

It all might have been different without one night in 1977. A scandal followed—and, five decades later, no one agrees on what happened.

The First Lady of Black country is from Houston, but her name isn’t Beyoncé. It’s Esther Phillips.

Why is Marco Rubio so hell-bent on making Iran-Contra again?

The “Jewish Question” is a scapegoating conspiracy. This essay traces its appeal, partial truths, and why it falsely absolves America of blame.

A new film depicts part of the long history of Shaker worship.

On the racist errors that caused a significantly Black parish in Colorado to lose a hallmark of African-American liturgy.

The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments are in trouble.

For years, the U.S. Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee reviewed ideas for commemorative coins marking America’s 250th anniversary.

Jeffrey Epstein helped Leslie Wexner repurpose the CIA’s Iran–Contra planes from arms smuggling to shipping lingerie.

The documentary depicts the kind of maverick journalism we desperately need in our authoritarian times.

The paper’s Gaza coverage continues its pattern of downplaying US-backed atrocities in Bangladesh, East Timor, and Guatemala.

Cold War nuclear testing left troubling levels of Cesium-137 in caribou, prompting years of research into Arctic fallout and its risks to human health.

How Americans came to see health as a personal responsibility.

The Chicago Outfit’s second life as nostalgia—and as presidential politics.

The Declaration drew on Enlightenment ideas to assert equality, justify independence, and inspire lasting debates over rights and slavery.

Religious liberty owes much to Jefferson and Madison, but the "impregnable wall" doesn't do justice to the founders vision.