Excerpts

“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.

When I moved to Lower Manhattan in 1967, I decided to make a picture of every building in the neighbourhood before the city knocked it down.

The black naturalist, astronomer, surveyor, and almanac-writer Benjamin Banneker took issue with Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward “those of my complexion.”

A second-generation immigrant, Hazel Ying Lee was the first Chinese American woman to receive her pilot's license.

The story of an incident that may have been the first time the issue of race was ever addressed on a baseball field in the Carolinas.

On the continuing regime of racial terror in the post-Civil War American South.

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.

On museum ethics and animal welfare in 19th century America.

In which “the intellectual handmaidens of the capitalists” are taken to task.

Connie B. Gay and the roots of country music militarization.

A quarter century on, the school shooters’ mythology has propagated a sprawling subculture that idolizes murder and mayhem.

Allison Rudnick on the rise and fall of the 19th century "Literary Poster."

A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s struggle against polio transformed him into the man who led the country through the Great Depression and World War II.