Excerpts

The war created a new world, an alternate reality distinct from what most people before 1914 expected their lives to be.

Telegraph operators were the first to know news of the Civil War.

An excerpt from Timothy Lombardo's "Blue Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics."

How Southern whites found replacements for their emancipated slaves in the prison system.

Sherilynn A. Ifill on justice (and its absence) in the 1930s.

Few democracies require children to make a daily declaration of fealty to country.

An excerpt from a novel by Todd Gitlin that reimagines the violence outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The bizarre origin story of the surprisingly exceptional Oklahoma City, in a government-sanctioned raid called the Land Run.

The connections between the two systems of labor have been persistently neglected in mainstream business history.

How an engraving of a slave ship helped the abolition movement.

Powell’s foresight might have prevented the 1930s dust bowl and perhaps, today’s water scarcities.

The struggle at universities was never a simple conflict of generations.

The beginnings of the end of private life in the late nineteenth century.

The tension between nationalist ambitions and republican principles goes all the way back to our nation’s founding.

How the US military figured out how to make self-stable cheese ... and helped invent Cheetos to boot.

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe.

The culture on Sapelo Island, Georgia was unique.

How seaside towns throughout the northeast limited the ability of ‘undesirables’ to access public beaches.

Is the Baby Boomer generation to blame for America's crumbling roads, galloping income inequality, bitter polarization and dysfunctional government?

When a "scofflaw carnival" occupied the L.A. aqueduct.

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”— Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg

The dictator modeled his racial campaign after another conquest of land and people-America's Manifest Destiny.

In 1931, Zora Neale Hurston recorded the story of Cudjo Lewis, the last living slave-ship survivor. It languished in a vault... until now.

James Callender spread scurrilous rumors about Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Then he turned on Thomas Jefferson, too.

Once John E. Washington started to dig, he found an incredible wealth of untapped knowledge about the 16th president.

How did a firearm safety and training organization turn into one of America's largest and most influential lobbying groups?

An excerpt from "The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido."

Even Twain's own autobiography cannot reveal the whole truth of the literary legend.

On 400 Years of Tribalism, Genocide, Expulsion, and Imprisonment.

It wasn't some radical left-wing pipedream. It was moderate; and it worked.

As King’s attention drifted to the problems of the urban north, his critiques came to focus on the economic system itself.

James Baldwin's dispatch from MLK's funeral foreshadowed an America we may never escape.

“When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

W.E.B. Du Bois on the beauty of sorrow songs.

The political theory of Trumpism.

Three reasons why you shouldn’t consult the nineteenth-century WebMD archives.

The Founders never intended to create an unregulated individual right to a gun.

Read an excerpt from Al Roker's book about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s most eccentric public service announcement.

The conclusions of the 1968 Kerner Report portrayed race relations like no other report in history.