Northwest Ordinance

In settling a rivalry between Maryland and Virginia and preventing individual states from getting into bed with France and Spain, maybe the Articles weren't a failure after all.

The old Midwest was a place animated by the belief that a self-governing republic is the best regime for man.

Was the nineteenth-century Midwest “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen”?

On the legal foundations that spurred centuries of civil rights movements.

Pursuing a Native alliance powerful enough to resist the American invaders, the Shawnee leader and his prophet brother envisioned a new and better Indian world.

How to hide an empire, from the Spanish-American war to CIA-sponsored Latin American coups.

The story of America is precisely the heroic story of pioneers who bring the American ideal again and again to the West.

When Puerto Ricans go to the polls, they can express their choice for several status options for the island.

Supported and largely led by slaveholders, the American Revolution was also, paradoxically, a profound antislavery event.

Popular accounts often trace the origins of forced penal labor to the post-Civil War South. But a vast system of forced penal labor existed in the antebellum North.

A welfare state doesn't distort the market; it just makes government aid fairer.

How an argument for segregated schools became a rallying cry for privatizing public education.

Their main objective was to draw attention to racist state policies and demand their repeal.

The confluence of Black and Indigenous history at Bdote.

An Illinois high school teacher explains how his state complicates the binary of “free states” and “slave states.”

Andrew Delbanco's new book positions the debate over fugitive slaves as a central factor in the nation's slide toward disunion.

In ignoring the messy realities of westward expansion, McCullough’s "The Pioneers" is both incomplete and dull.

But can locally empowered communities really fix our schools' problems?