Excerpts

From Bikram yoga to Tae Bo, the 1990s exploded with exoticized consumer fitness products.

“For those Afro-Caribbean Panamanian who had lived through Panama’s Canal Zone apartheid, Brooklyn segregation probably came as no surprise.”

Predicting a hurricane in nineteenth-century South Carolina.

Nineteenth-century New York City was filled with books, bibliophilia, and marginalia.

The banjo did not exist before it was created by the hands of enslaved people in the New World.

The FBI’s successful campaign against white supremacists is also a cautionary tale.

The Police Beat Algorithm’s outputs were not so much predictive of future crime as they were self-fulfilling prophesies.

The author of a book about William Still unearths new details about the leading Black abolitionist—and reflects on his lost legacy.

The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism.

Considering the lessons and history of Crockett Johnson’s classic.

The story of Motley's legal career prior to Brown v. Board, and her crucial participation in it.

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s unique blend of traditional and progressive sensibilities.

The elixir had antifreeze, for flavor. Nobody blinked—at first.

Pseudonyms allowed Adams to audition ideas and venture out on limbs without fear of reprisal.

How the city's urban and suburban landscape shaped its alternating history of oppression and opportunity.

Before Geronimo met any white Americans or came to think of them as enemies of the Apaches, he spent years fighting Mexicans.

That status has been taken as obvious, then questioned, then reasserted over the decades.

Several years before the United States officially entered World War II, Black Americans were tracking the international spread of fascism.

Faculty and staff once owned slaves, and professors taught racial eugenics.

On the legal challenges to racist presidential policy that led to the Trail of Tears.

Like so many other reluctant revolutionaries in New York, he seemed the antithesis of the rabble in arms that the British identified with the mobocracy.

The death of Elma Sands and the Manhattan Company.

On “all wars” memorials.

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.

Rather than a “colonial America,” we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial.

An excerpt from a new book on the so-called "Jewish Kennedys."

Forty-one of the 561 enslaved Africans on board the "Guerrero" died when the illegal slave ship sank off the Florida Keys in 1827.

Describing the experiences of radicals who lived in, traveled to, or found themselves in Mexico between 1910 and 1920.

The story of the modern web is often told through the stories of Google, Facebook, Amazon. But eBay was the first conqueror.

Service members were attacked, discredited, and shortchanged on GI benefits—with lasting implications.

How Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, a star-studded cemetery in Los Angeles, corporatized mourning in America.

As Republicans denounce climate change as a “hoax” and dismantle the environmental regulatory state they worked to build, we are left to wonder: What happened?

When James G. Blaine went to war with his son's ex-wife in the national press, he had no idea that two could play that game.

The early history of rating credit in America.

In 1967, I was in the middle of one of the world’s buzziest stories.

An excerpt from "The Hidden History of Neoliberalism."

My Chinese-immigrant parents dreamed big for me, their American-born daughter whom they raised in the suburbs east of San Francisco.

The history of patrols, body cams, and more.

In midcentury America, the machine itself became a character.

The sinister history of fumigating “foreign” books.

On the alarming origins of the current political moment.

Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today's regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.

Abortion and "The Scarlet Letter."

How an intense unclassifiable relationship shaped the history of modern thought.

She was Helen Keller before Helen Keller. Then her mentor abandoned their studies.

King recalled: “I liked his voice, though I had no idea he was getting ready to conquer the world.”

To many urban Americans in the 1920s, the car and its driver were tyrants that deprived others of their freedom.

Andrew Liptak on the origins of cosplay.

Creating the myth of the gold rush with the help of daguerreotypists.

The baby boy who would one day become the renowned and feared leader of the Lakotas was the second child of Returns Again and Her Holy Door.