Excerpts

In excavating the story of King’s visit to Harlem Hospital, I uncovered my grandfather’s own fight for civil rights.

Jeff Sessions tried to jail an activist couple trying to ensure the black residents of Alabama the right to vote.

Longtime tenant in the 165-year-old St. Denis building in New York City reflects on the building's history.

Author Jesmyn Ward on the racism “built into the bones” of the state where she grew up and is choosing to raise her children.

This weekend is the anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s fateful decision to enter the 1968 presidential race. What if he hadn’t?

Fifteen years after the U.S. invasion, there’s no satisfying answer to the question: What were we doing in Iraq anyway?

What can making now tell us about the past? Or should the past remain untouched?

Thanks to federal immigration policies, immigration from Ireland has all but dried up.

On Edward Said, othering, and the depictions of Arabs in America.

Searching for where I belong, I find myself cobbling together a mongrel Judaism—half-remembered and contradictory and all mine.

The Courage and Comic Genius of Groundbreaking Female Stand-Ups

After my son died, how could I know anything for certain?

Here's how the mystery of her true identity was solved.

SNCC staff photographer Danny Lyon recounts his experiences in the early days of the civil rights movement.

On my transition from editor of terrible history books to a writer of mediocre ones.

How I learned to fiddle my way through America's deeply troubling history.

For most of our history, the U.S. government treated biracial Americans as if we didn’t even exist, but my family has stories to tell.

One film fan's struggle to reconcile the things she loves with the things she knows to be true.

A melody can carry an undeniable purpose even before it gets paired with a lyric.

“It is one thing to play dress-up, to imitate pronunciations and understanding; it is another thing to think or dream or live in a language not your own.”

I didn't know the Confederate general owned slaves. I didn't even know he was part of the Confederacy.

Twitter, valuing expansion over principles, achieved its goal of changing the world. But not in the way that it planned.

We thought we knew the white working class. Then 2016 happened.

Patterson Hood argues that Tom Petty achieved perfection in his songwriting... time and time again.

Were the real prisoners of war the young Americans who never left home?

Louise Mirrer reflects on the history and memory of the Vietnam War and a new exhibit at the New York Historical Society.

Empty pedestals can offer the same lessons about racism and war that the statues do.

The "father of U.S. gynecology" is usually depicted as either a monstrous butcher or a benevolent healer. It's not that simple.

Richard Spencer is a troll and an icon for white supremacists. He was also my high-school classmate.

Memorials to the Lost Cause have always meant something sinister for the descendants of enslaved people.

How the hit musical allows those who have been left out of the story to claim the narrative of America as their own.

A third-generation mill worker pays homage to the controversial industrialist.

"Removing the flag in South Carolina was one thing, but racism exists in South Carolina as policy and social practice."

Members of the Revolution look back on Prince's massive, awe-inspiring 'Purple Rain' tour in our exclusive oral history.

On the centenary of his birth, seeking the man behind the myth.

Behind the veil of middle-class acceptability, Archie comics shaped the conception of virtue in postwar America.

The stories of two American soldiers – one part German, the other born in Japan – challenge our romantic view of the "Greatest Generation."