Excerpts

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.

The new punk generation made the hippies look past their prime.

On the pro-business transformation of the Democratic Party.

George Leonidas Leslie is still waiting for his HBO series.

The Lakota advocate helped thousands of domestic abuse survivors, Native and non-Native alike.

The symbolic battles of World War I.

Creating a personal myth allows celebrities to create just that—a myth.

On the terror that filled the void left by the retreat of federal authority in the South.

Retro was not the antithesis to the sub- and countercultural experiments of the 1960s, it grew directly out of them.

Even if her husband was a murderer, a woman in a bad marriage once had few options. Unless she fled to South Dakota.

The relationship between two true believers in American exceptionalism.

Many of the CIA analysts who spotted the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise were female. They had trouble getting their warnings heard.

Fierce disagreements over Zionism have played out from the movement’s inception among Jews, including community leaders who worried it would spark antisemitism.

On the early years of America's chronicler of the Great Plains.

A photographer excavates personal history through reconstruction of Adams's World War II photographs of Japanese Americans.