Excerpts

Fisher Ames’s philosophy can be summed up as follows: the “power of the people, if uncontroverted, is licentious and mobbish.”

In the 1940s about 20,000 men trained on racially segregated Montford Point in North Carolina.

Firecrackers are essentially un-American, even though we associate them with our most deeply patriotic celebration, the Fourth of July.

The history of the Supreme Court is replete with outrages and abominations, but they can be tough to overcome.

The latest US Census—used to decide representation in Congress—is flawed. One surprising solution? Enlarge the House of Representatives.

Decade by decade, firearms have become deadlier—and tightened their grip on our collective imagination.

An interview with Ben Tarnoff, the author of "Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future."

It's where legends like Tina Turner and Ray Charles launched their careers.

What the life of Richard Holbrooke tells us about the decay of Pax Americana.

The US Supreme Court's most recent decisions undermine centuries of established secularism within American government.

Bisexuality introduces nuance, which has always made it easier to discard than accommodate it .

His failed attempts to bring the Emmett Till tragedy to television forced him to get creative.

Mapping offered geographers and their readers an opportunity to understand and influence how empires transitioned into something else.

A scholar of gun culture looks at the roots of Americans’ love affair with firearms – and their willingness to accept gun violence as a price of freedom.

Cheap palm oil is part of an interlocking late capitalist system.

Fifty years ago in 1972, as spring faded and summer arrived in late June, America (and the world) was a vastly different place.

A spotlight on a primary source.

A spotlight on a primary source.

A spotlight on a primary source.

A spotlight on a primary source.

Michael A. McDonnell’s book is a wonderfully researched microhistory of the Michilimackinac area from the mid-17th to the early 19th century.

Slaveholding plantations of the 19th century used scientific management techniques—and some applied them more extensively than factories.

White racial violence in America has never been a random collection of individual or unrelated crimes of passion against minorities.

An editorial to the "National Anti-Slavery Standard," republished in "Letters from New York."

A spotlight on a primary source.

The Court’s striking down of a New York gun law relies on a fundamentally anti-democratic historical record that excludes women and people of color.

As the craft beer industry reckons with its oppressive past, it may be time to re-examine the complicated history (and present) of hops in the United States

A lack of enforcement has blunted Title IX's transformative potential.

No woman should have to go through what I went through, and no woman should have to overcome barriers to obtain a safe abortion.

Federal housing policies contributed to the segregation of American cities in the twentieth century. But it was private interests that led the way.

The conservative Supreme Court's favorite judicial philosophy requires a very, very firm grasp of history — one that none of the justices seem to possess.

Elements of the Puritans’ unique worldview were handed down for generations and were carried westward by their descendants, the people we call Yankees.

Military experts seeking to identify partial skeleton in an anonymous grave.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11, we had relative peace and prosperity. We squandered it completely.

How a feisty, suicidal Nobel laureate infuriated both Hitler and Stalin, and stalled cancer research for fifty years along the way.

How a bloody gun duel between two doctors in Transylvania sparked a frenzy of outrage—and helped create the American Medical Association.

Bombshell revelations won’t hurt the former president with his core supporters. We have only to look at Oliver North to know why.

The past does not speak to us; we speak for the past.

Black history lives in memories and minds. COVID-19 has endangered those traditions.

Green burials — the long-ago practice of laying loved ones to rest in biodegradable wooden caskets or shrouds, without embalming — are gaining in popularity.

The American socialism movement's open participation in and with the broad democratic left benefits the socialist cause.

Steve Kaslov sought to improve the civic status and rights of Romani people in the United States.

On a broiling summer afternoon in 1978, the Women's Movement held what was then known as the largest parade for feminism in history.

“I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty and for Beauty to set the world right,” W.E.B. Du Bois said in his June 1926 lecture.

Communists fighting the color line. Baseball players resisting owners. Baseball's untold history of struggles against racial injustice and labor exploitation.

Seating was segregated, and the ceremony's only Black speaker was forced to drastically revise his speech to avoid spreading "propaganda."

Amidst the January 6 hearings, the fiftieth anniversary of Nixon’s scandal reminds us that it has only gotten harder to hold presidents accountable.

New understandings of how disease spread informed Imogene Rechtin's ill-fated 1910 campaign to ban a universal human practice.

In 2015, precisely 31 years to the day of her death, blues and cabaret singer Alberta Hunter was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.

It’s time to admit that the nation’s highest court has been a source of harm more often than it’s been a force for justice.