Excerpts

On the Grateful Dead's “New Speedway Boogie,” and the true end of the Sixties.

The strange past and even stranger future of the stationary bicycle.

On the women who kickstarted the ecological restoration movement in America.

William James, Charles Peirce, and the questions that roiled them.

Using manumission to disentangle blackness and enslavement in Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia.

Colonial lessons in civility from the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee.

Winfred Rembert on protesting in the Jim Crow South and getting arrested.

An accounting of racist murders in nineteenth-century America.

In good ways and bad, the Golden Arches have always loomed large in the African American experience.

On the growing tide of racial animosity in 1930s Los Angeles.

How cars changed the lives of black Americans.

When Pete Townshend whacked Abbie Hoffman offstage.

Lisa C. Hickman reconstructs William Faulkner’s tumultuous Hollywood sojourn of 1932–1936.

Ben Katchor's Brief History of the Dairy Restaurant.

When Charles Sumner died in 1874, a bill he had sponsored two years earlier threatened to overshadow his legacy.

Before Americans worried about government or corporate surveillance, 19th-century criminals took advantage of a new technology to steal valuable information.

A story born in blood.

Forced to bear her enslaver's children, Mary Lumpkin later forged her own path to freedom.

On who gets caught in the crosshairs when it comes to “beef."

Airlines sometimes bumped Black passengers off of flights to make room for white travelers, even during refueling stops.

An excerpt from a new book that explores the intertwined history of travel segregation and African American struggles for freedom of movement.

People’s stories described a sluggish process of discovery: you had to discover the earthquake, even though it had already been shaking you for what felt like a very long time.

Built on the momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom.

The idea of liberty has often seemed to mean freedom from government and its spending. But there is an alternate history, one just as foundational and defining.

Jackalopes have migrated from Wyoming across the nation, but what’s really known about the mythical creature?

After the passing of William James, mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor.

On the relationships formed and marriages made by the fur trade.

How the Windy City became a Latinx metropolis in the second half of the twentieth century.

Once Peter Parker received his miraculous spider powers, the last thing he wanted to do was go out and get a colorful costume and fight crime.

Over the past century, the United States came to rely ever more on economic coercion—with questionable results.

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.

They weren't about to let all that good camel hair go to waste.

A new book traces the tactics of groundbreaking lawyer Constance Baker Motley amid pivotal protests in Birmingham.

Refusing myths of joy and pain in slave narratives.

Insuring against the cost of insurance itself in Revolutionary-era America.

What the Confederacy actually was: a proslavery anti-democratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.

How the authors of the Depression-era “Business Plot” aimed to take power away from FDR and stop his “socialist” New Deal.

Through slavery, Indian boarding schools, Japanese internment, mass incarceration, and anti-Communist wars against civilian populations in Latin America.

On the nineteenth-century artists and thinkers who pictured a future of abundance powered by steam.

The history of anti-Chinese violence in Truckee, California, is as old as the town itself.

"What the Catholic church wanted us to understand about women and anger—that we simply didn’t experience it—backfired spectacularly."

Thomas Jefferson imagines an unequal gender utopia.

Listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears again.

In 1741, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results help us see how Enlightenment thinkers justified slavery.

How James Baldwin confronted America's most exceptional lie.

At the height of his powers, the Black Nationalist leader was assassinated, and the government botched the investigation of his murder.

What happened to the last million Eastern Europeans in refugee camps in Germany, who refused to return home, or who had no home to return to.

In our own era of uncontrolled working hours, controlling our time is a vision of freedom worth capturing.

In an excerpt from his new book, ‘Let the Lord Sort Them,’ Maurice Chammah explains where a 1970s legal team fighting the death penalty went wrong.

The Columbus Pacesetters weren’t satisfied being an afterthought or a gimmick, so they bought their franchise and the ability to make decisions for themselves.