Excerpts

The skin and strength on display at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach aggravated American fears of gender transgressions and homosexuality.

Black miners were intentionally erased from the record of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster. A new book reinserts them into the narrative.

In many Southern states, "Brown v. Board of Education" fueled decades of resistance to school integration.

A website with documents, maps, and essays about the lynchings that occurred in Texas between 1882 and 1945.

An elegiac retelling of rap's origins, "Hip-Hop Is History" also ends with a sense of hope.

Today’s battles over issues like gender nonconformity and reproductive rights have antecedents that have been lost or suppressed. What can we learn from them?

Seven scholars discuss the definition, nature, practice, and periodization of corruption in the United States.

According to authors of a new book on how Iran has coped with economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., no one does.

How Buffalo Bill’s Wild West brought scenes from the American West to audiences around the globe.

The key measure of a healthy economy has long been growth, yet if production and consumption expand at their current rate we risk the health of the planet.

First discovered in 1938, Teflon has been used for everything from helping to create the first atomic bomb to keeping your eggs from sticking to the pan.

Klaxon horns, once standard safety equipment, disappeared from the roads after World War I. But the tensions they exposed about urban noise still echo.

MAGA has been a largely white movement of non-urban people who seem to think that people unlike them are scary and that there is only safety in homogeneity.

Why were so many early European books laden with self-deprecation? Blame genre conventions.

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

For God, politics, love, integrity, or a sense of ennui, film stars at the height of their fame have left the industry behind.

In the forty-eight years that she’s lived in the West Village, the owner of the iconic cookbook shop has never ordered delivery.

In 1964, he toured Africa and the Middle East on a journey that would both transform his outlook and reveal the limits of transnational solidarity.

Explore science fiction worlds from the last few decades – and what these fictional settings tell us about ourselves.

The supposed recluse constantly sent letters to friends, family, and lovers. What do they show us?

A long Euro-American tradition of genocide and ethnic cleansing imagined freeing a barren Palestine from Palestinian barbarity and heathenism.

At the fourth annual Hanford Journey, Yakama Nation youth, elders and scientists share stories about a land that is a part of them.

A grand strategy for a turbulent world.

Who can migrate to the US and make their home here? Who gets to drop US-made bombs, and who is expected to suffer them? These are not unrelated questions.

Over the centuries, the beloved treat has become an integral part of our national identity.

A look back at the men, women and machines that made America’s favorite treat possible.

On Hitler’s attempt to win Americans over to his cause.

Democrats’ years-long efforts to reclaim the word are cresting in this year’s Presidential race.

How Ayabe-way-we-tung guided his tribe in the midst of colonization.

The story of a group of people who get together each year to reenact the notorious 1946 Moore’s Ford lynching in Georgia.

Christine Blasey Ford’s memoir captures the hazards of “coming forward.”

During the first decade of the New Deal, modernist architects designed schools for disabled children that proposed radical visions of civic care.

The 2008 election sparked an outburst of brightness and positivity across pop culture. Now hindsight — and cringe — is setting in.

How an unlikely American friendship should inspire diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The story of an unofficial, integrated delegation from Mississippi that attempted to claim seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and was denied.

And national security became everything.

Just about every major development in the current presidential campaign started as a television event.

My grandmother and the fight over the 1964 Mississippi delegation.

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

Fears of great wealth and the need for economic equality go back to the country’s origins.

Tracing the transformation of the Great Plains to the widespread belief in “manifest destiny,” and weighing the power of words to shape landscapes.

In the online era, brick-and-mortar book retailers have been forced to redefine themselves.

The future of college in the asset economy.

Racist mobs attacked a 1949 concert in Peekskill, NY, raising anti-communist fervor and showing how hatred could gain legitimacy amid today’s political turmoil.

On the introduction of the Franklin stove into the American home and the ensuing stove revolution.

In the sport’s post-Depression heyday, one audacious grifter beat the odds with an elaborate scam: disguising fast horses to look like slow ones.

Capturing the 1968 DNC.

Plus: How George Washington almost ruined his own exit from the national stage.

The Black-owned club became a Great Falls hotspot, welcoming all to a music-filled social venue for almost thirty years.

By framing the U.S. as a victim, 'Red Dawn' obscured U.S. aggression in Latin America and elsewhere.