Excerpts

How abolitionists viewed the American flag.

How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?

The view from nowhere came from somewhere.

The war marked a sea change in how black men viewed their own citizenship.

Debating the meaning of gender is hardly new, but the clinical origin of the word may come as a surprise.

In 1928, two Americans invented a large metal breathing device that would become synonymous with polio treatment.

Redistributing land was once central to global development efforts—and it should be today.

Meet the self-help author who wanted to teach corporate America how to think.

The disclosure of Billy Graham's recommendation of war crimes did not exicte any commotion.

The United States’ destruction of Iraq remains the worst international crime of our time. Its perpetrators remain free and its horrors are buried.

A new account sheds light on the Ford administration’s war against Sen. Frank Church and his landmark effort to rein in a lawless intelligence community.

It is impossible to understand the U.S. without understanding its Indigenous history, writes Ned Blackhawk.

How Black women used exercise to achieve civic goals in the late nineteenth century.

The Klan dens of the heartland were powerful, vicious, and ambitious. Indiana was their bastion.

“I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” Twain said. “It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.”

When the smoke cleared in D.C. following the 1968 riots after the assasination of MLK, the city's black communities organized to rebuild a more equitable city.

Competition over eggs on the Farallon Islands in the midst of the California Gold Rush in San Francisco led to an all out war between eggers.

From Hemingway to Mencken, no one thought a woman could write about combat.

A new book tells the definitive history of an Alabama community founded by survivors of the slave trade.

She risked everything to escape a life of poverty and become one of the nation's most read columnists, while advocating for the advancement of women.

The impact of Black ball players' fight for higher compensation and labor protections in the ‘70s is felt today.

A new book offers the first full-length biography of newspaper editor, labor leader and minister Samuel Ringgold Ward.

The decline of the John Birch Society offers possible strategies for containing the MAGA movement.

A new book about the first lady reveals how she and the ailing President Woodrow Wilson silenced their critics.

All coed camps can be like this. But Jewish ones were different.

A century ago, physical fitness was part of a strange subculture, where strong bodies were extraordinary and meant to placed on pedestals for people to observe.

How Emily Dickinson, scientists, and other writers theorized plant intelligence in the nineteenth century.

In 1947, the United States sacrificed for the sake of a starving Europe.

A new book calls white evangelicals to reckon with the fact that the groundwork for their movement was laid, in part, by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI.

The role of family in Huey P. Newton's educational journey.

A fatal combination of fear, power, and hubris.

From Underground Railroad conductors who risked everything to present-day residents who show kindness to travelers.

The region has been in the disruption business for nearly 150 years.

How dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.

Plants and settlers take root in a new mythology of Arizona.

In the 19th century, food science promised to improve the health, robustness, and productivity of humankind.

The experiences of Michael and Zoharah Simmons show that the fight against the carceral state is embedded in a larger project of building a just world.

The unconventional origins of the modern antiwar movement.

My mother’s part in the 1970 repeal of New York’s abortion law is a lesson for today’s activists: all politics is local.

Black refugees’ journey from Virginia to Boston after the Civil War.

Isabella Stewart Gardner builds a place to house her art.

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.