Excerpts

The Civil Rights Movement was a radical struggle against Jim Crow tyranny whose early foot soldiers were Communists and labor militants.

A lively defense of narrative history and the lived experience that informs historical writing.

An interview on the queer history of a forgotten prison.

The most important dimension of the sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s was the increased freedom of sexual speech.

Why have historians overlooked the connections between abolitionism and the famous New England cultural movement?

The legacies of our racial past, and the prospects ahead for an embattled republic.

How the study of historical memory created a new reckoning with the creation of “American history."

America is best understood not as the first post-colonial republic, but as an expansionist nation built on slavery and native expropriation.

For the 30th anniversary of "Dirty Dancing," we spoke to the film's screenwriter about her revolutionary decision to include a depiction of an illegal abortion.

An interview with Ben Tarnoff, the author of "Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future."

Slaveholding plantations of the 19th century used scientific management techniques—and some applied them more extensively than factories.

Communists fighting the color line. Baseball players resisting owners. Baseball's untold history of struggles against racial injustice and labor exploitation.

Noam Chomsky discusses the hypocrisies of US empire and why if we really wanted to build a decent society, we’d immediately slash the massive military budget.

An interview with Woody Holton on his new book, "Liberty is Sweet."

Debates about what should be America’s role in the world are not new—neither is the slogan “America First.”

A conversation with historian Donna Murch about the past, present, and future of Black radical organizing.

Kim Stanley Robinson on how the High Sierra has influenced his science fiction.

Michael Washburn explains what we can glean from the failure of Tom Petty's 1985 concept album "Southern Accents."

A conversation with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on his new book, which investigates the co-option of identity politics and the importance of coalitional organizing. 

Nelson “Little D” Ross talks soul and significance with music historian Robert Gordon.

In “Captives,” former Rikers detainee Jarrod Shanahan traces the history of New York City’s sprawling jail complex, and its centrality to brutal class struggle.

An expert on the white-power movement and the “great replacement” theory puts the act of terror in context.

A new book uses the story of a former slave trader who profited after the Civil War by trafficking in convict labor to trace the historical roots of mass incarceration and racial profiling.

Dan Berger interviews Stuart Schrader about his new book on US imperialism.

To fix things, we must acknowledge the nature of the problem.

The rise and fall of the WASP.

They really do not have anything to do with each other.

An interview with Jesse Tarbert about the history of the American state, “big government,” and the legacy of government reform efforts.

The author of new book explains the fraught and turbulent relationship between religion and government in the U.S.

What connection does the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have to the party of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?

A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people.

Smokeable pot's proliferation in North America involves the Mexican Revolution, the transatlantic slave trade, and Prohibition.

The author discusses Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight, racism in magazines, and why she’s so hopeful for the future of music and writing.

A conversation with historian Gary Gerstle about understanding neoliberalism as a bipartisan worldview and how the political order it ushered in has crumbled. 

While the world’s fastest-growing religious faith offers material benefits and psychological uplift to many, it also pushes a reactionary political agenda.

The key witness in Clarence Thomas’s nomination process discusses how sex and race shaped the new Justice’s experience, and her own.

A conversation about "Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World."

The system's roots aren't in rescuing children, but in the policing of Black, Indigenous, and poor families.

Josh Hawley’s attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are part of a long, sad tradition.

Historian Daryl Scott weighs in on the 1619 Project and the "possibility that we rend ourselves on the question of race."

Historian Robin Einhorn reflects on Americans’ complicated relationship to taxes, from the colonial period through the Civil War to the tax revolts of the 1980s.

Prisons have been controversial since their beginnings in the late 1700s — why do they keep failing to live up to expectations?

Revisiting post-war activist movements around the world to understand generational conflicts in the left.

A new book tells the stories of four interwar writers who laid the groundwork for modern journalism.

Bay’s new book explores the intertwined history of travel segregation and African American struggles for freedom of movement.

Barbara Smith, a key contributor to contemporary Black feminist thought, formed the Combahee River Collective to address Black women's interlocking oppressions.

The radicalization of a congressional clerk in the 1800s and the introduction of the telegraph set a young country on a new trajectory.

A conversation with Louisa Hall about her novel, “Trinity.”

We often associate dance with art and performance, but it is also a way that humans document, interpret, and create history.

The scholar has changed the way Black authors get read and the way Black history gets told.