Excerpts

Trump’s threats to take control of the Panama Canal have precipitated a struggle over the country’s sovereignty.

The legacy of right-wing ideologies in California.

The turbulent late sixties saw the technique’s popularity explode—and it’s been helping moviemakers engage with the unsettling tempos of modern life ever since.

Myths are fed back as stereotypes and strawmen to divine some boundary for acceptability.

History’s academic study is now deeply politicized, with partisan views shaping beliefs and debates over even basic historical facts.

Why does the power to launch nuclear weapons rest with a single American?

The Native activist spent nearly fifty years in prison for the killing of two F.B.I. agents. In January, Joe Biden commuted his sentence, and he went home.

How FDR invented national security, and why Democrats need to move on from it.

Eve Adams was imprisoned for disorderly conduct and obscenity, then sent back to Europe, where she became a target of the Holocaust.

How William F. Buckley Jr. turned his father’s private convictions and prejudices into a major political movement.

1988 was a pivotal year in how “white liberals” are perceived by their fellow Americans.

A dark mystery shocked America in the early 1990s, from prime-time shows to Congress. It’s largely been forgotten. It shouldn’t be.

U.S.-Iran diplomacy, intelligence on South Korea's nuclear program, and fears that a reactor given to India would become a “do-it-yourself bomb kit.”

June 25 marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. But the truth is that the US was a willing partner in mass murder across the peninsula.

In Skrmetti, the Court turned to a decades-old decision once thought to be consigned to history.

A group of early 20th-century Catholics sought to impose their standards of morality onto the growing and scandal-ridden Hollywood film industry.

The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism.

A new state law forbids education increasing ‘awareness’ of issues relating to race. How are educators supposed to teach history?

Shahn was an American phenomenon, but a new retrospective suggests that we’ve come to prize his politics over his accomplishments.

In June 2016, President Obama proclaimed the first LGBTQ+ national monument in the United States at the site of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City.

How did the concept become the solution to society’s most deeply entrenched problems?

More than three decades since "Paris Is Burning" put the underground scene on a world stage, ball culture remains a haven for the queer community.

National security governance, then and now.

ICE officers are wearing masks to conceal their identities. The Ku Klux Klan also employed masks to avoid prosecution for its acts of racial violence.

Israel is attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, but Tehran’s secret path was blazed by the Israelis.

How did freedom become synonymous with having lots of options?

Advocates of “military Keynesianism” present it as a boon for the working class. In reality, it diverts resources away from social provision.

A teacher tells the story of 1974’s Olean, New York High School murders.

St Louis organizer Bill Sentner led some of the most successful labor battles in Midwestern history by uniting workers across race and gender lines.

The past really is a foreign country, as historian Jonathan Ablard finds when piecing together the turbulent history of his ancestors in the West and Midwest.

Why does the diagnosis of Gage social ‘disinhibition’ lean so heavily on flimsy documentation about Gage, while overlooking the case of Eadweard Muybridge?

In the 1960s, amid the shipping industry's decline, the empty piers became a site for cruising and creativity for gay men in particular.

A historian reviews new books by Peter Beinart, Avi Shlaim and Pankaj Mishra on the project that animates Israel’s violence.

The Interstate Highway System created a national polity defined by circulation. To rethink the Interstates is to rethink the United States.

The rollback of LGBTQ rights echoes a deeply consequential chapter of American history: the Lavender Scare.

This Juneteenth we need to discard the caricatures of King that we so often see and learn from what he actually did and believed.

Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has also been a place where those liberties end.

We live in polarized times when freedom is threatened but this Juneteenth we should remind ourselves that we have overcome far worse.

We cannot divorce the independence of the executive branch from its substance.

When Jim Obergefell and his partner John Arthur decided to marry after more than 20 years together, their home state refused to recognize same-sex marriages.

Red Scare can be read as solid history of the years it depicts—and chilling prophecy of the years to come.

Domestic deployments have generally been quite restrained. Can they still be?

Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.

Even some liberals toasted William F. Buckley Jr. as a patrician gentleman. A long-awaited new biography corrects that record.

The nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, depicts a wounded, fearful society, teetering on the brink of disaster. Sound familiar?

Undermining international oceans governance could damage American interests.

Toni Morrison was an editor for 12 years, even as she wrote her own masterpieces. I spoke to her authors about being edited by an icon.

McKinley led a country defined by tariffs and colonial wars. Trump is drawn to his legacy—and determined to bring the liberal international order to an end.

How an Ovid-quoting London broadsheet from the late seventeenth century spawned “Dear Abby,” Dan Savage, and Reddit’s Am I the Asshole.

The commander-in-chief initially barred black soldiers from joining the ranks, but he came to understand the value—both moral and strategic—of a diverse force.