Excerpts

Lessons from a 1975 proposal for a state-owned public bank.

But not because the founders wanted to see more guns in the hands of Americans.

The shah of Iran faced a secular opposition that wanted to restore constitutional government.

A discussion with Father Stephen M. Koeth about religion and suburbanization.

Left-wing intellectuals' early responses to the 9/11 terror attacks.

How Condor launched a wave of cross-border assassinations and disappearances in Latin America.

How a century of undervaluing women’s labor echoes in policy today.

From Saint-Simon to Silicon Valley, the urge to forecast the future has always masked a struggle over who gets to define it.

The high-stakes struggle to make women’s history visible to all Americans.

The story of the "battle of the bulge."

From Nixon to Trump.

What U.S. policymakers should know about U.S.-Africa relations.

On the rhetoric and failure of the Hoover administration.

A myth and its legacy.

The private-equity billionaire spent decades building influence in the capital. Then his philanthropy collided with the president.

For years, one man complicated the official story of who murdered the civil-rights leader. Just before he died in October, he offered a jaw-dropping revelation.

Doctor, writer, musician, and orator: Rudolph Fisher was a scientist and an artist whose métier was Harlem.

Ken Burns has set himself the impossible task of retelling a national origin story that all Americans will embrace as their own.

Efforts to surveil and undermine activists went far beyond infamous operations such as Cointelpro.

Though his writings grappled with the contradiction between bondage and liberty, Thomas Jefferson’s life was indebted to those he enslaved.

Movement conservatism’s excommunications have always centered on one set of issues.

A new book examines Americans' long obsession with the enticing and oppressive concept of entrepreneurship.

A history of Catholic immigration and activity in colonial North America.

The documents show how CIA spymaster James Angleton hid Oswald’s movements, hid a secret Israeli liaison, and lied to Congress for decades.

The mindset Franklin demonstrated in his scientific work helps us understand his political accomplishments.

The holiday’s real roots lie in abolition, liberation, and anti-racism. Let’s reconnect to that legacy.

The settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not escaping religious persecution. They left on the Mayflower to establish a theocracy in the Americas.

A century ago, artists who survived the trenches captured humanity’s capacity for destruction. What can they teach us in a new age of genocide?

A classic book on UFO believers and their “cognitive dissonance” after aliens failed to land is called into question.

The origin stories of Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Farrar, Sraus and Giroux.

A new book offers bitter commentary on the onset of the age of American empire.

The Marquis de Lafayette’s final visit to the United States in 1825 can show us how to commemorate the Revolution.

A look at the long history of censorship in public school yearbooks.

In the 1830s, college students protested slavery. Many colleges and elites wanted them to stop. 

David Lilienthal’s account of running the TVA can read like the "Abundance" of 1944. We have a lot to learn from what the book says — and what it leaves out.

In colonial America, government “thanksgivings” blurred faith and politics. For Quakers, rejecting them was an act of religious conviction.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leaves out his father's role in pushing false flag plans for a war with Cuba.

The Mars craze is a case study in twisting evidence and defying facts.

What Ken Burns gets wrong about the war that made America.

Putting religious rights of foster parents above civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. youth, a new executive order reënacts the original sin of the child-welfare system.

The Founders didn’t model us on the Six Nations, and George Washington didn’t tomahawk a Frenchman.

For a fight at Thanksgiving, bring that one up.

As high school students embraced political activism, adults turned to the authorities to shield their sons and daughters from radical influences.

On U.S.-American Indian treaty-making and Ely Parker's role in its abolition.

Ken Burns’s new documentary unpacks the Revolutionary War—and explains why history doesn’t repeat, even if human nature never changes.

About 1.5 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic in Liverpool ships, but the city's slave trade was barely acknowledged until recently.

A train wreck that caused the death of more than a dozen commuters was the impetus behind a monumental project that changed the urban landscape.

The complex justice whose Youngstown concurrence continues to influence debates over executive power.

The constitutional ideas in Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet.

The congressional anti-communist hearings of the 1940s are a reminder that freedom of speech today is even more fragile than it may seem.