Excerpts

Adam Chandler’s new book explores the intersection between fast food and U.S. history.

The international ambitions of the US slaveholding class and the abolitionist movement that brought them down.

Kap wasn't the first, and he won't be the last.

A century ago, the invocation of science was key to making Americans believe that newcomers were inferior.

Judy Juanita on her novel 'Virgin Soul,' which incorporates her experiences as a Black Panther living in San Francisco.

Black barbershops are a symbol of community, and they provide a window into our nation's complicated racial dynamics.

From prehistoric caves, through Aztecs, Mormons, Beat poets, Jean-Paul Sartre and a British MP.

A conversation with the curator of an exhibit about the oft-overlooked lives of women in early colonial Virginia.

Before Linda Brown became the lead plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education, a generation of black girls and teens led the charge against “separate but equal.”

The Communist Party fought for racial equality in the South, specifically Alabama, where segregation was most oppressive.

Johnson’s impeachment was driven by his refusal to rid the country of the lingering effects of slavery.

Huerta was far more than an assistant of Cesar Chavez, leader of United Farm Workers, and she risked her life for her activism.

A Q&A with author Katharine Gerbner about "Protestant Supremacy."

The author of a book on paramilitary white supremacy discusses the methods and ethics of researching racial violence.

On the many moments when white Christians could have interceded on behalf of racial justice, but did not.

A songwriter-historian weighs in on the controversy over Lil Nas X’s country-trap hit.

On why he became a public thinker, the relationship between race and class, and his work in light of new histories of capitalism.

Suicide during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

“How to Hide an Empire,” explores America far beyond the borders of the Lower 48.

The author of a new biography explains how Murray changed the way that discrimination is understood today.

The co-winners of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize on researching slavery.

A new book traces the “citymaking process” of riots and rebellions since the era of Dutch colonization to the present.

The U.S. did not always find it necessary to lock up people seeking asylum.

From Davy Crockett to Teddy Roosevelt, this is the legacy of hunting in American culture.

A member of the 1960s-70s collective Computer People for Peace talks about the early days of tech worker organizing.

Historian Mae Ngai reflects on how a century of immigration law created a crisis.

A new book bursts the bubble on what we’ve learned about the Civil Rights era to show a larger movement with layers.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

On Douglass’s monumental life, the voice of the biographer, memory and tragedy, and why history matters right now.

How postwar Christmas embraced spaceships, nukes, and cellophane.

Four historians weigh in on evangelicals' affinity for Trump – and their commitment to the conservative movement more broadly.

Author Sarah Churchwell on the entangled history of America’s most loaded phrases.

On writing the story of America, the rise and fall of the fact, and how women’s intellectual authority is undermined.

What can their fascination with the supernatural teach us about life in our own post-truth times?

An interview with horror historian David J. Skal.

A new book offers lessons drawn from Harper Lee's ambivalent treatment of this iconic character.

How voter suppression became a political weapon in American politics.

African American educators became the ‘hidden provocateurs’ who spearheaded the push for racial justice in education.

A hurricane historian talks about the still-unfolding disaster in Puerto Rico.

A century-old image and the film it inspired.

The FBI has long tried to destroy socialist organizations, but its actions aren't limited to surveillance.

A new book conjures the complexity of the Bay Area and the perils of its immense, uneven wealth.

Muzzleloaders have evolved into smart-style automatic firearms in just 150 years.

When residents of the U.S. came to see Latin Americans as partners in a shared revolutionary experiment.

In a new book, a historian explores the American fascination with conversion, and its costs. 

The Founding Fathers were more interested in limiting democracy than securing and expanding it.

Simeon Wade describes visiting Death Valley with Michel Foucault in 1975.

Remembering how the white working class got left out of the New Left, and why we're all paying for it today.

Elizabeth Hinton discusses how twentieth-century policymakers anticipated the explosion of the prison population.

His photo of Kim Phuc was a transformative moment in a horrible conflict.