Excerpts

In the 20th century, American Communists were seen as an enemy within. In reality, they were ordinary people with complex lives that deserve to be chronicled.

African American insurance and the actuarial double bind.

How vacations went from being a purview of the rich to an expectation of a rising American middle class.

How a now-obscure financier turned the Bahamas into a tax haven—and created a cornerstone of global plutocracy.

Brothel guides’ descriptions of brothelgoers asked that if respectable men could enjoy sexual pleasure for sale in American cities, why couldn’t their readers?

How Wilbert Longfellow turned America into a nation of swimmers.

The president once said “Israel could get into a fistfight with this country and we’d still defend” it. That is now clearer than ever.

Is this America?

As Chinese migrants arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border, politicians are reviving old anti-Chinese rhetoric that has done lasting harm.

Unlikely activist Don Baker scored a landmark win for gay rights in Texas 42 years ago this week.

Even as they've diversified, suburban politics have remained protectionist — often defying ideological categorization.

As protesters prepare for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a half-century old report provides lessons for preventing chaos.

In 1936, Victor Green published a guide of restaurants, gas stations and lodgings that would accommodate African Americans travelling across the country.

If you are unwilling to do this work — and it is work — then leave that word alone.

Vice presidential nominees weren't tasked with flinging mud until the last 40 years.

Cardboard boxes hold a world of meaning that spans from Amazon to the Container Corporation of America.

How the fruit helped create the California dream.

How gay Republicans tried to counter the religious right and show Christians it is ok to be gay.

In the 1930s, disillusioned farmers and ranchers fought to carve a 49th state out of northern Wyoming, southeastern Montana and western South Dakota.

A century ago, Springfield, Illinois, descended into a two-day spasm of racial violence and mayhem that still has the power to shock.

A college group pioneered the dirty tricks that led to Watergate. Fifty years later, the tactics still poison politics.

Since the 1950s, the GOP has simplified the causes of inflation in order to blame Democrats.

What the scholarship on biraciality tells us about politics now.

Donald Trump supporters run their version of the original dog-whistle attack ad against Kamala Harris. Here’s the history.

As summers get hotter, public pools help people stay cool. Why are they so neglected?

Enslaved woman Charlotte thought she was "free" from the slaveowner. She was wrong.

Whose knowledge matters in a changing region?

The U.S. government’s failure to recognize nuclear Downwinders in New Mexico is part of a broader failure to reckon with the legacies of the Manhattan Project.

The journey of America’s police force from a non-professional night watch to a highly visible and professional force.

The popularity of tanning rose in the early twentieth century, when bronzed skin signaled a life of leisure, not labor.

A look at the psychedlic-inspired music scene of Detroit.

Kamala Harris is the heir to a political lineage that dates back to a chain-smoking, hard-drinking mastermind elected to Congress from San Francisco in 1964.

A new book argues that we misunderstand the forces that drove the notorious slave rebel.

You are not Gen X. You are not a Millennial. Unless you are a Baby Boomer, you are nothing.

Two books that remind us that tone and timbre, musical style and sound, matter to history.

In the Mad Men era of magazine journalism, Virginia Kraft was a globe-trotting writer and a deadly shot with a rifle. Why hasn't anyone heard of her?

An animation historian on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon charged with electrifying everything in the early 20th century.

The anxiety about “Mexicanization” that ran through Reconstruction-Era politics, as Americans saw disturbing political parallels with their southern neighbor.

The author of "Cahokia Jazz" reflects on the similarities between historical fiction and science fiction, and the imaginative space opened by archival silences.

Of the presidential elections in early America, few have stressed the themes of sex and gender so spicily as the heated contest of 1856.

A prison is a difficult thing to kill.

Eighty years ago this month, the Kennedy who might have been president was killed on a secret mission over England.

A statistical analysis of how music composition evolved over time.

Ironically, Chevron deference — which the conservative Supreme Court scrapped last month — began as a conservative legal tool.

Douglass elaborated a political theory attuned to the differential character of law as it applied to slaves and other outlaws.

From religious liberty to religious violence, it helps to get our facts straight.

Revisiting Meredith v. Fair, we get the inside story of how critical race theory was developed in the years after Brown v. Board of Education.

Chronicling the emergence of a unique blend of counterculture and Christianity.

Photographs of wild flowers taken by photographers from a Christian utopian community that settled in East Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th century.

To defeat the leftist Sandinistas, Washington provided aid to the Contras along with a crazy psychological warfare anticommunist manual.