Excerpts

My investigation spanned continents, centuries, and the bounds of good taste.

The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

How the Boss provided a 50-year-long soundtrack for the last of the Baby Boomers.

On teaching in a red state, the silences in our history lessons, and all I never learned about my hometown.

Tracing markers from near and distant past and unspooling the narratives about the imprints we leave on the planet for what they say about the future.

Correspondence about writing, travel, and friendship, from 1926 through 1929.

The archive silences the voices of Black women, invalidating the realities of Black women and subjecting enslaved and free(d) women to epistemic violence.

Myths are fed back as stereotypes and strawmen to divine some boundary for acceptability.

A new state law forbids education increasing ‘awareness’ of issues relating to race. How are educators supposed to teach history?

Amid a rise of laws forbidding discussions of racist histories, sharing our ancestors’ shameful wrongdoings is more urgent than ever.

Reflections on the literary legacy of a timeless American novel.

How the City College of New York went from an experiment in public education to an intellectual hot spot for working class and immigrant students.

In the nineteen-sixties, artists such as Bo Diddley and the Ike & Tina Turner Revue played the prom at Pembroke-Country Day.

As a child in postings around the world, the author witnessed the agency’s complex relationship with American empire—and with autocrats everywhere.

Justin B. Wymer knows a snake when he sees one.

For decades, Houston families like mine have helped keep the flame of independence burning.

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.

For residents, organizers, and onlookers, neighborhoods can be a window for witnessing and making sense of history.

Black internationalism broadened our politics of solidarity.

As the nation’s highest court debated Native sovereignty, I was in the archives, uncovering family stories entwined with those debates.

Why did so many American Jewish women find Christian Science appealing?

How my great-grandfather invented himself at the end of Reconstruction.

Baldwin wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve.

Coding was a preserve of elites, until BASIC hit the streets.

America should be ashamed of slavery, but black Americans do not bear the burden of shame.

"But he'd have to acknowledge that the soul of his country is southern; the soul of his country is black."

The history of Camp Wo-Chi-Ca tells a largely overlooked story about left-wing politics and Black culture.

In 1965, eight years before Roe v. Wade, an anonymous woman described the steps she took to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

How I learned the story of the My Lai Massacre.

Laos was collateral damage in the U.S.' secret war. The wounds are visible in the land and in generations still waiting on justice.

Cataloguing basement fallout shelters in the summer of 1967.

The city in summer floated in a daze that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting “Hot enough for ya?”

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing.

How history shaped the modern U.S. Border Patrol agent.

Camps once sold a story about social improvement. Now we just can’t conceive of an unscheduled moment.

A former systems operator logs back in to the original computer-based social network.

How we rediscovered the tragedy in Mississippi that ushered us into the Great Migration.

How preparation for a big purchase turned into an adventure through history.

Silence and volume in collections and institutions.

Top Chef contestant Nini Nguyen shares the history of the Viet diaspora and how two cultures combined to create a whole new delicious Southern flavor.

Touring the palimpsests of cities.

Often dismissed as a “trash fish,” the porgy is an anchor of Black maritime culture.

Better browsers made things worse.

In this new hobby, I found so many stories.

The inventor of the atomic bomb, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s new film, was the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism.

Again and again, a fervant British anticommunist's filmstrip of the novel shows images of women in states of distress.

Loft life above the Fulton Fish Market and the day that everything changed.

One academic tells the story behind his new book -- and his next one.

My ancestors were the good whites, or at least that’s what I’ve always wanted to believe.

As a white teenager in Charlotte, Elizabeth Prewitt saw mandatory school busing as a personal annoyance. Going to an integrated high school changed that.