Excerpts

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.

The untold story of the Wide Awakes, the young Americans who took up the torch for their antislavery cause and stirred the nation.

Agitprop, Israel, and the shape of the world after WWII.

“We await our moment, in pursuit of the picture that Corky envisaged, a portrait of a community that is too large and too brilliant.”

How a mid-century architecture competition reimagined the American home.

Meditating on blotter not just as art, or as a historical artifact, but as a kind of media, even a “meta medium.”

Female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds fought to tell their own stories.

The early years of a future basketball icon.

In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly reinvented themselves.

From a 1915 suffragist road trip to the “First Lady of Drag Racing.”

How a 1960s interspecies communication experiment went haywire.

A journey through the African American landscape.

Remembering the river helps me forget, at least for a moment, the challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy I experienced in my childhood.

On the inseparable histories of matrimony and disunion in the United States.

The President's spiritual journey transformed him and the nation.

The creators of Yale’s Civil War Memorial were more concerned with honoring “both sides” than with the true meaning of the war.

As he told a friend years later, "the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips."

A visual journalist remembers a time when "housing was more flexible, fluid and communal than it is today.”

The recent history of copyright in music cannot be separated from the rise of technologies for the recording and transmission of content online.

A detailed look on Abraham Lincoln's political philosophy on slavery, ownership, and freedom.

A document in her papers in the Library of Congress sheds new light on postwar research on psychedelics.

On April 5, 1910, the world was stunned by socialists’ victory at the ballot box in Milwaukee.

A front-row seat to a slow-moving catastrophe. How tech both helps and hurts our world.

My research shows that this tradition runs deep.

One woman’s crusade for democratic participation and political efficacy in the face of powerful institutions.

During the interwar years, the American journalist reported on political unrest in Cuba, Germany and Spain.

Her athletic performance in New York impressed onlookers of all colors and cracked opened the door for a new generation of Black players to come.

I lived on Indian Creek with my grandparents after my mother suffered a nervous breakdown.

As a versatile but complex hero, King led a life open to interpretation by politicians and activists of all types who fiercely debated his legacy.

Exploring Deaf history, language and education as the hearing child of a Deaf adult.

On the early origins of a very American kind of writing.

Because of the growth of the Prohibition state, police abuse fomented considerable discussions among police and lawyer associations, criminologists, and others.

The slow unraveling of a nation’s suburbs.

How The Go-Go’s emerged from the LA punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album.

“It was made under the worst of conditions,” the filmmaker reveals in a new book. “People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle.”

How "Behold a Pale Horse" found its way to the Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep’s Prodigy, Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, NAS, and more.

Baby brokers often tricked Indigenous Mayan women into giving up newborns; kidnappers took others. International adoption is now seen as a cover for war crimes.