Excerpts

"Inevitably, the age of national bootblacks and national oyster houses and national blacksmiths produced national history books."

The expansion of banks like Citigroup into Cuba, Haiti, and beyond reveal a story of capitalism built on blood, labor, and race.

In 19th-century America, rare old bones were a resource like any other.

Frank Malina's Scientific Dreams Were as Radical as His Politics.

The context and aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

At what point does resistance become the only choice?

Most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

In the realism, the set pieces, the operatic music, Sergio Leone was pointing the way towards modern filmmaking.

The economics of childbirth under slavery.

From Bob Dylan to David Bowie to The Beatles, the legendary Beat writer’s influence reached beyond literature into music in surprising ways.

Their 1964 collaboration, "Nothing Personal," brought together aspects of American life and culture through photographs and text.

In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, 'Calder: The Conquest of Time,' Jed Perl reveals a hidden side of the artist.

John Canaday's poems look at nuclear weapons from the intimate perspectives of its developers.

When a trillion locusts ate everything in sight.

25 years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die.

A city on the edge.

On the 1909 National American Woman Suffrage Association Convention in Seattle.

We don't think much about where our waste goes, but the history of what we do with poop is also the history of how we grow food.

From 1966-1969, the underground newspaper 'San Francisco Oracle' became exceedingly popular among counterculture communities.

50 years later, Philip Levine's poem, "They Feed They Lion," helps us remember and understand that time.

Exploitation and predatory pricing drove the transformation of the beef industry – and created the model for modern agribusiness.

Dale Carnegie treated the employee-employer relationship as a sacred, symbiotic bond.

Dispatches From Flatville, Illinois.

Junk Science, paternalism, and a misplaced faith in 'expertise.'

The improbable success of the curveball.

The development, use, and marketing of medications for children in the 20th century.

The function of the "innovation" buzzword is to sustain the myth that business genius creates society’s wealth.

The 1868 presidential election through the eyes of a Southern white woman.

Father and son alike, suspicious of too much charisma.

We all know the stereotypes. But what about the suburbs of utopians and renegades?

Silicon Valley veteran Mike Monteiro explains how designers destroyed the world.

Baldwin demands that the Atlanta child murders be more than a mere media spectacle or crime story, and that black lives matter.

Pornographers were in many ways the innovators who fueled the rise of the internet as we know it.

A photographer whose work resembles that of a realist novelist, we observe a cast of characters as they change over time.

Awakening from illness, the newly risen patient announced that Jemima had died and that her body had been requisitioned by God for the salvation of humankind.

The author of 'High-Risers' revisits 'Candyman,' in which public housing is the greatest horror of all.

Boston and Providence meet the famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker.

An early nineteenth-century feminist fights back against a narrow view of woman’s place in society.

The black pioneers who tried to start over out west.

From the 80s onwards, the borderlands were rife with paramilitary cruelty and racism. But the president’s rhetoric has thrown fuel on the fire.

A few of Encyclopædia Britannica’s famous readers, on the occasion of its 250th anniversary.

A dark chapter in the history of religious persecution.

How a team of lawyers exposed lies about police violence.

On the erasure of American "territories" from US history.

On Collier’s 1950 cover story, “Hiroshima, USA: Can Anything Be Done About It?”

Bridgett M. Davis tracks her mother's journey from Nashville to Detroit.

“Our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. Our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”

That's when the public learned that American multinationals were making enormous bribes to politicians in foreign countries.

Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. But modern fire suppression creates fuel for catastrophic fires. Is it time for a change?

An excerpt from a recently discovered memoir of World War I, "The Burning of the World."