Excerpts

A new history of spiritualism during the Civil War era suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

The Dahomey had fierce female fighters. They also sold people overseas.

Although most enslaved people worked in the fields, captive workers with strong swimming and diving skills were also exploited by plantation owners.

How will they interpret the past?

Commemorating the Holocaust has become a central part of American culture, but the nation’s reaction in real time was another story.

A second life for an organization of scientists who questioned how their work was being used.

As Buffalo Bill's performers, they were walking stereotypes. But a New York photographer showed the humans beneath the headdresses.

LSD, ecstasy, and a blast of utopianism: How 1967’s “Summer of Love” all began.

In 1962, tricked black Southerners into migrating north and transformed families' lives forever.

The modern Republican Party has tied itself to Roe v. Wade. With the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs, the party is vulnerable to new issues.

How James Baldwin speaks to lethal myths of white innocence—and why his work belongs in public-school classrooms.

The rise of the “economic style of reasoning” in the 1960s cannot be properly understood without attending to the political fallout of earlier decades.

An excerpt of “My Brother’s Keeper,” the essay that chronicles the Bureau’s various crimes over two centuries.

John Jacob Astor’s "A Journey in Other Worlds" is a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future.

A very old concept remains a key part of navigating the United States' broken immigration system.

America’s gerontocracy is disconnecting Congress from the rest of the country.

Murdered during the 1929 Loray Mill strike, Ella May Wiggins became a working-class martyr—and a symbol of labor’s fight to democratize the anti-union South.

Alone in his stand, Weldon Heyburn despised that Robert E. Lee would be memorialized with a statue in the U.S. Capitol.

Kristine K. Ronan describes her discovery of two Native American statues at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

How a best-selling series gave young readers a new sense of agency.

The practice of seeing Florida’s people, culture and history in caricature form is deeply rooted in the state’s colonial past.

Institutions meant to secure peace, from NATO to the U.N., date back to Truman’s Presidency. So do the conflicts threatening that peace.

How the story itself came out.

Against the backdrop of another conflict over slavery in 1861, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote an in-depth narrative of Denmark Vesey's planned slave revolt in Charleston, SC.

The practice of “redlining” kept people of color from home loans for decades.

We must dive deeper into the intellectual artifacts of black women thinkers to support the evolution of black feminist discourse and political action.

The interconnected circles of writers, painters, muses, and more.

How U.S. agricultural policy has evolved over time.

How the Eighteenth Amendment fueled America’s taste for ice cream.

How the push for statehood led a beacon of racial progress to oppression and violence.

Mississippi's Black residents have long fought for access to clean water.

Fifty years ago, zealots preaching misogyny and homophobia—led by an accused sexual predator—took over America’s largest Protestant denomination.

How new student loan programs turned students into consumers — and ignited a competition among universities that left them drowning in debt.

Guthrie challenged the commercial aesthetic of the pre-rock era through a performance style that was almost combatively anti-musical.

What America’s last major party crack-up in the 1850s tells us about the 2010s.

An excerpt from "The Hidden History of Neoliberalism."

Edward Bernays and the colonial adventures of the United Fruit Company.

Brad Ricca dives into the history of the Cleveland Indians' name and the creation of "Chief Wahoo."

Uvalde's current protests against gun control mirror those of student protests in the early 1970s.

Getting the history of “busing” right enables us to see more clearly how school segregation and educational inequality continued in the decades after Brown.

Urban density was once seen as a sign of unhealthiness and poverty, but today it is necessary to make cities sustainable.

Ken Burns’ account of prohibition tells a popular story of booze in America. The historical record is far more sobering.

My Chinese-immigrant parents dreamed big for me, their American-born daughter whom they raised in the suburbs east of San Francisco.

The huge, declassified document includes death threats, red scare performances, and extensive investigation into her Yahoo! Groups fan site.

Theodore Roosevelt said his made him look like “a mewing cat.” Lyndon Johnson called his “the ugliest thing I ever saw.” Ronald Reagan ordered a do-over.

In the 17th century, Dutch proselytisers set out for Asia, Africa and the Americas. The legacy of their travels endures.

The aviation pioneer was many things before—and after—her career as a pilot was cut short.

The history of patrols, body cams, and more.

The electricity industry knew about the dangers of climate change 40 years ago. It denied them anyway.

We will never truly achieve racial justice until we, collectively, learn how to treat and heal the wound of white supremacy.