Excerpts

Bill Clinton gutted welfare and criminalized the poor, all while funneling more money into the carceral state.

An alternative tradition in our politics has long helped convince Americans that tax enforcement is good.

How a folk hero inspired one of the most covered songs in American history.

A new book on Claude McKay is part of an effort to place the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance within the Black radical tradition.

The 2015 Paris Agreement represented a shift in the climate regime towards "new governance," expanding the roles of nation-states and non-state actors alike.

Why are so many songs of the Confederacy indelibly inscribed in my Yankee memory?

Responding to a controversial recent critique of "presentism," two historians make the case that history and politics have always been deeply interwoven.

In midcentury America, the machine itself became a character.

How British protestantism connected colonies and empire until the rupture of the American Revolution.

One of the country’s oldest fire lookouts was destroyed last year in the largest wildfire in California’s history. What else is being lost?

Three books explore a history of fractious extremism that predates Donald Trump.

How to understand Adam Smith’s politics.

A tribal collaborative project that seeks to understand settler colonialism and its legacies through the lens of Indigenous enslavement and unfreedom.

Explore some new and old radio maps in our collection, and learn a bit about the history of radio communications.

How did facial hair win American men’s hearts and minds? Thank the War on Terror.

The defining boundaries and problematic categorizations carried by our culture's treatment of the label "millennial."

Economic and social issues with roots in the 1994 midterms are still being debated today.

Liberal Protestants built a global elite in the 20th century. Its fracturing holds a caution for evangelicals today.

A new book traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.

How the case of the kidnapped paperboys accelerated the “stranger danger” panic of the 1980s.

Rhetoric and representation in the Southern Life History Project.

The emergence of the supermarket was used as a key piece of anti-communist propaganda early in the twentieth century against the alternative of grocery co-ops.

The invention was once received with chilly skepticism but has become a fixture of American life.

The diminished status of the non-white working class is not a matter of accident, but of design.

These invisible chemicals changed the Mohawk way of life. They’re probably already in you, too.

Formed in 1912 for “women who did things—and did them openly,” the Heterodoxy Club laid the groundwork for a century of American feminism.

Women’s military uniforms were once about making soldiers look feminine. Now they’re about enhancing performance.

I wish I’d asked my grandfather more questions.

The Office of Malaria Control in War Areas sought to curb malaria transmission in the United States.

For all her influence as an activist, intellectual, and writer, Angela Davis has not always been taken as seriously as her peers. Why not?

In Theodor de Bry’s illustrations for "True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia," the Algonquin are made to look like the Irish. Surprise.

The dark side of Crèvecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer."

The journey of Omar Ibn Said.

Louis Farrakhan and the Black Lives Matter protests.

By all accounts, young Bill Owens was a natural song-catcher, trawling across Texas in the 1930s, the golden era of American field recording.

The US-Mexico border wall is disrupting and destroying the lives of a united binational community.

Hundreds—or maybe thousands—of women and girls performed and recorded rock and roll in its early years.

Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.

It exposes their failed mortgage debt relief policies after the Great Recession.

"On the Road" is a sad and somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure. It’s also a story about guys who want to be with other guys.

In 1970 Roger Freeman, who also worked for Nixon, revealed the right’s motivation for coming decades of attacks on higher education.

Meyer Berger’s 1938 look at the technology, history, and culture of eavesdropping, from the wiretapping of Dutch Schulz to the invention of the Speak-O-Phone.

After the deadliest home-front disaster of the war, African Americans throughout the military took action to transform the nation's armed forces.

Weird, revealing, and incredibly fun to read.

Romanticized stories about the Second World War are at the heart of American exceptionalism.

Tourist-driven curiosity about the so-called "haunted asylum" has led many to overlook the real people who once were institutionalized within these hospitals.

His communism brought the great American singer Paul Robeson trouble in the US, but helped make him a hero in China.

McGirt v. Oklahoma and the failure of denationalization.

If we’re never going to hold U.S. war criminals accountable, what moral credibility do we have when we condemn Russia and others?

Missionaries spread the idea that Christianity accounts for American success throughout the world.