Martin Luther King Jr.

James Baldwin's dispatch from MLK's funeral foreshadowed an America we may never escape.

On the trail to Montgomery.

Americans have looked to the Declaration of Independence when they sought to remedy contemporary problems and create new visions for the country’s future.

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

Tracing John Lewis’s lifelong fight for democracy and inclusion.

They might be surprised that the republic exists at all.

The question of what Jefferson meant by “all men” has defined American law and politics for too long.

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin’s Freedom Budget is the key to understanding the appeal of the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor.

A biography of Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah casts the post-WWII era as a Black liberation epic rather than a psychodrama between Moscow and Washington.

The radical lives of James Baldwin.

While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Dorothy Parker is more astute than most on matters of style.

A Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and colleges should be understood as the culmination of William F. Buckley conservative movement.

Six decades of civil-rights efforts haven’t budged the racial wealth gap, and the usual prescriptions—including reparations—offer no lasting solutions.

The torturers have been revising, the gestapos have been busy, and the prisons have been full for generations.

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

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

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

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

He challenged the violence of US power, abroad and at home. His radical internationalism, from Congo to Palestine, speaks to our moment.

She translated Black freedom movements' ideals into forms that children could enjoy and grasp, nurturing their political consciousness through music-making.