Excerpts

How neoliberals fell in love with “human nature”—the glue that still unites the divergent factions of the new right.

In the 1930s, approximately half a million Mexicans left the United States. Many families had American-born children to whom Mexico was a foreign land.

This Passover, American Jews should embrace the fight for “emancipation of all kinds.”

In 1966, the conductor arrived in Vienna with a mission: to restore Gustav Mahler’s place in 20th-century music.

In the 1990s, an entire industry was born of trying to convince Americans that Beanie Babies were a great investment opportunity.

Vincent Conlon’s secret life in the United States as an operative and gun-running Irish rebel.

The public and private battles waged across Europe and the United States during the 1918 flu pandemic.

On the ongoing battle to desegregate schools across America throughout the 1960s.

Confederates kidnapped free Black people to sell into slavery. After the war, two women sought help from high places to track down their lost loved ones.

Dean Acheson, President Truman’s prim, patrician undersecretary of state, was sitting in his office on February 21, 1947, when he received a visitor.

For historian Russell Shorto, it was all about water.

On the scholarship and intellectual legacies of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, William Dunning and other academics.

Who decides how history gets written?

In 1885, white rioters murdered dozens of their Asian neighbors in Rock Springs, Wyoming. 140 years later, the story of the atrocity is still being unearthed.

Was the pro wrestler known as “the Cuban Wonder” really the first Black world champion?

And why so many people remember the tale so differently.

Video games, violence and the enduring allure of the vigilante hero.

The scene at the 1964 Republican National Convention, when Barry Goldwater was nominated and black Republicans’ worst fears about their party were confirmed.

If world leaders had been clearer about the sanctions Putin would face, they might have deterred his invasion of Ukraine.

On the early career of the actor-cum-politician who changed America.

Video has become our dominant cultural medium, yet we lack reliable archives for the audiovisual record.

The Puritan origins of modern ideas about migration.

Max Gordon, Prohibition, and the transformative creation of the Village Vanguard.

In the summer of 1842, young Abraham Lincoln’s razor-sharp wit almost got him into a whole heap of trouble.

Levity and play — eerily combined with anxiety, terror, and deadly violence — shaped the identity and image of Early Republic militias.

How historians changed their approach, from the 1960s to the present.

The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.

A narrative not of brain drain but of Black aspiration.

On Pierrepoint B. Noyes, H.G. Wells, and the “Superweapons” of early science-fiction.

In memory of Martin Luther King Jr, a look back on his funeral.

Depictions of Antietam couldn’t possible capture the magnitude of the battle’s horror.

In the 1970s, a crop of books purporting to provide a scientific basis for gender inequality met sharp criticism from figures like Gould.

On John Huggins, Angela Y. Davis, and the complex history of an oft-misunderstood political movement.

The life of John Andrew Jackson — and the vacillating richness and scarcity of the archive.

On the ongoing legal struggle for educational and racial equality across the United States.

On civilians’ opinion of killing civilians by air during World War II.

On the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago.

In the 1920s, many in the U.S. fought for a living Constitution. Plenty of others wanted it dead.

In which John B. Calhoun begins to study the lifestyles of rodents, and the public listens.

On the lengths newspaper publishers took to reach new subscribers — and then drive them away — in the 1930s.

In the 1970s, some athletes began questioning the alliance between sports, conservative Christianity, and politics.

The very American racism of the notorious late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

When the 1930 Hays Code banned pregnancy in film, birds took over the business of birth.

The ruling class used false claims about white women’s sexual virtue to regulate sexuality. But the “white slavery” panic was also about race, class and labor.

Private insurance companies have long dominated the provision of social security in the United States, but resistance is growing.

Using film and advertising to sell capitalism and nationalism to immigrants in the early 20th century.

At universities, American Marxism has led to good scholarship, but it’s also encouraged hyper-specialization and the use of impenetrable jargon.

On the rise of the narcotic farm model, a radical reimagining of the nation’s approach to addiction.

Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned.

Why rock overtook every other genre to define our understanding of America at war.