Excerpts

In many Southern states, "Brown v. Board of Education" fueled decades of resistance to school integration.

On Hitler’s attempt to win Americans over to his cause.

How Ayabe-way-we-tung guided his tribe in the midst of colonization.

During the first decade of the New Deal, modernist architects designed schools for disabled children that proposed radical visions of civic care.

Chronicling the emergence of a unique blend of counterculture and Christianity.

An excess of restrictions has taken a very real toll on the lives of everyday Americans. Their stories must be told.

One young conservative lawyer would lead a determined fight to maintain Lewis Powell’s blindfolded race neutrality.

On the early years of the real estate industry, and the racist effort to convince white Americans to buy single-family homes.

Following the careers of a family of especially corrupt border control officials.

A story of math and political stasis.

Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland provide an outlet for antiwar soldiers.

In 1943, a Harvard librarian was quietly recruited by the OSS to save the scattered books of Europe.

On Nathanael Greene’s inauspicious start.

“Who controls the past,” George Orwell wrote, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” So it has been with baseball.

Black wet nurses made a show of militance in 1937.

On the impact of systematic oppression on indigenous cuisine in the United States.

On self-pleasure and sex education in children's literature.

How a tragedy in New York City convinced Americans to learn how to swim.

On defying gender norms and expectations in extreme sports.

The erased histories of the communities that built Seattle.

On the life and times of Jason Epstein, cofounder of “The New York Review of Books.”

On the profound impact of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" on Noam Chomsky's early embrace of left-libertarian and anarchist ideologies.

For generations of American radicals, the path to liberation required a new constitution, not forced removal.

In a momentous couple of years, the young United States added more than a million square miles of territory, including Texas and California. 

The moral terrain of crowdfunding is fueled by two persistent social ideologies: the dual, and intertwined, myths of meritocracy and the “deserving poor.”

On the meaning and use of rivers and other waterways.

Finding a story in the ways Robert Ray Hamilton, John Dudley Sargent, and Edith Sargent weren’t quite forgotten. 

The rules governing everything from “Big Brother” to “The Real Housewives” started three decades ago, with a radical experiment on MTV.

On our millennia-long love-hate relationship with getting in the water.

The American method of high-risk, potentially high-reward investments has fueled innovation from New England whaling ventures to Silicon Valley start-ups.

The story of how Harriet Tubman led 150 African American soldiers to rescue over 700 former slaves freed five months earlier by the Emancipation Proclamation.

Panic about Catholics, Freemasons, and, later, Jews, is deeply woven into American history, and forms the basis of our fertile culture of conspiracy theorizing.

Looking back on the environmentalist and anti-globalization movements of the 1990s.

Brea Baker on Black land ownership, historical injustice, and the hope for Black Americans to own more than one percent of the land.

The Scottish-born naturalist’s early years in the United States.

On the long and continuing struggle of women artists for recognition on their own terms.

Childhood trauma led Minty Ross (Harriet Tubman) to seek divine intervention.

In the wake of the 1964 Harlem riots, June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s plan to redesign the neighborhood suggested new possibilities for urban life.

From the tomato to the hamburger bun, the invention has transformed not just what we eat but taste itself.

How James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others embraced a new Black humanism.

Public schools are crucial infrastructures of the reproduction of social inequality and the US carceral state.

When labor found a common cause — and enemy — with the abolition movement.

On the construction of America's new capital city.

What happened in 1970 after Richard Nixon was told, “I doubt that there would be any problem of student demonstrations in Tennessee.”

When he reflected on the consequences of empire, Conrad saw no logic or teleology. He saw mayhem. There is no surety in "Heart of Darkness."

Waiting for the start of the American Civil War in Canada and the Caribbean.

On the fragile facade of republicanism in 19th century America.

Researching the Sandinista Revolution from Nicaraguans’ perspective.

In 1936, the Czech track star Zdeněk Koubek became world-famous after undergoing surgery so that he could live openly as a man.

Abolitionist and writer John Swanson Jacobs on reclaiming liberty in a land of unfreedom.