Excerpts

We don't need to find heroes in our past presidents. We need to try to understand that tyranny has always been part of American freedom.

Americans love games of chance, but history shows they're a poor substitute for a robust investment in public goods.

The 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.

Cicely Saunders realized that preparing for a good death is the first step in providing one.

In the cultural wasteland of the Reagan era, they showed that a band could have mass appeal without being cheesy, or nostalgic, or playing hair metal.

When Thomas Jefferson penned ‘all men are created equal,’ he did not mean individual equality, says Stanford scholar.

Democrats have often described Latinos as decisive when they support liberal candidates and inconsequential when they don’t.

The labor troubadour Joe Hill was executed by a Utah firing squad for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit.

Leaders of the political right learned lessons from the 1960s that still inform the movement today.

The success of Reagan reflects the market demands of a more fragmented moviegoing public—and reality.

History can make the U.S. better prepared for the specter of protracted large-scale ground combat, which has grown more real in the wake of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The story of how Ed Carnes became a judge offers crucial lessons for those who hope to unwind the policies of mass incarceration.

As resistance to integration mounted, Florence Mars bought a camera and began to photograph many subjects, including the trial of the killers of Emmett Till.

How fifty years of barcode magic came to be.

From the French Revolution to January 6th, crowds have been heroized and vilified. Now they’re a field of study.

Conservatives love to bemoan their supposed status as oppressed minorities in universities. But the college campus has long been a key site for the Right.

Jean Strouse explores the relationship between the Anglo-Jewish Wertheimers and John Singer Sargent, who painted twelve portraits of them.

In the 1970s, trucker films like "Smokey and the Bandit" celebrated rebellious, working-class solidarity and freedom, with complex politics at play.

Radicals have long been blamed for wildfires in the Pacific Northwest.

The forgotten history of the Lloyd-La Follette Act and of whistleblowing in the federal workforce.

Apple experts divide time into “before Honeycrisp” and “after Honeycrisp,” and apples have never tasted so good.

Trump's second term echoes 19th-century policies: tariffs and immigration limits protect workers, while deregulation risks widening inequality.

The ADL's influence on U.S. politics mobilizes against Black and Arab leaders, enforces pro-Israel stances, and capitalizes on anti-hate efforts.

The Supreme Court’s deference to FDR during World War II resulted in unjustifiable ethical breaches.

Trump's seeming mixup of asylum-seeking refugees with patients in psychiatric institutions stems from a long rhetorical and political tradition.

Christian supremacists are plotting the end of America as we know it.

How a simple message came to be used nearly word-for-word in elections large and small for more than 200 years.

Stephanie Mueller´s book sheds light on the percieved death of liberalism and the fear of corporations.

The project of “reclamation and celebration” proceeds from an impulse to rediscover black Greats who by force of their own will make “change.”

Some early progressives may have been advocates of states’ rights, but they misunderstood the philosophy of the American Founding.

It’s part of a project to rebuild Washington-on-the-Brazos, “the birthplace of Texas,” where the declaration that created the Republic of Texas was signed.

The rejection that ended Morse's art career eventually led to the invention of the telegraph.

Churchill weaponized her powers of seduction—but Pamela Harriman came into her own when she brought her glamour to Washington.

The unraveling of this long-buried atrocity is forging a path toward reconciliation.

As a congressman, Davy Crockett found ways to navigate populist upheaval and maintain his own independence.

Charles Lindbergh’s ideology prefigured Donald Trump’s—and was rightly disgraced.

Vito Marcantonio fought racial, social, and economic injustices, promoting cross-cultural solidarity and progressive ideals amid McCarthyism and segregation.

America’s path has been contested since its founding, and realizing the promise of liberty required generations of struggle.

In the midst of the Great Depression, one CIO union used the new administrative state to influence legislation on behalf of people considered outcasts.

In "Counterrevolution," Melinda Cooper reads the 1970s economic crisis as an elite revolt rather than proof of the New Deal order’s unsustainability.

The novelist's aestheticizing impulse contrasts with the relentless seriousness of his observations and critiques of American society.

When the Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party merged into the Democratic machine, its populist energies were chewed up and spat out.

How an obsessive hatred of immigrants and people of color and deep-seated fears about the empowerment of women led to the Klan’s rule in Indiana.

Despite having their citizenship withheld before the war, Chinese American women in the Bay Area made significant contributions to the wartime labor force.

What the failed Southern labor movement teaches us about the rightward shift in US politics.

Stephen Bright and Bryan Stevenson defended the abolition of capital punishment at a moment when political support for that movement reached its nadir.

From white supremacists to black activists, readers have sought moral legitimacy in Milton’s epic poem.

Carson pioneered a new style of late-night hosting—relaxed, improvisatory, risk-averse, and inscrutable.

A liberalism that divides humanity into a master class and a slave class deserves an asterisk as “white liberalism.”

Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.