Excerpts

The counterculture dictum to “turn on, tune in, drop out” did not quite capture Janis’s philosophy to “get it while you can.”

While New York has yet to break away from the rest of the country, it's not for lack of trying.

Something unusual happened in New Orleans music around 1895. Was it the birth of the blues?

Today, the holiday is just a chance for ExxonMobil to release nonsensical ad campaigns. But once upon a time, it was a radical success story.

Some recordings in the New York Public Library’s wax cylinder collection haven’t been heard in generations—until now.

The American Midwest was once a site of radical experimentation for various communitarian groups. What has become of their legacy?

This post is part of a symposium on “The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution,” a new book by Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath.

The line from America’s earliest empire in the Philippines to Japan, Korea, Vietnam—and anti-Asian violence at home—is straight, clear, and written in blood.

Historian Daina Ramey Berry's April 2022 congressional testimony on the role of banks and insurers in US slavery.

The filmmaker’s new documentary on Benjamin Franklin tells an old and misleading story.

Three books offer views of the shift from public planning to neoliberal privatization, and emphasize the need to reclaim planning in the public interest.

A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people.

Judith Shklar fled Nazis and Stalinism before discovering in African-American history the dilemma of modern liberalism.

Smokeable pot's proliferation in North America involves the Mexican Revolution, the transatlantic slave trade, and Prohibition.

What began as an attempt to find more job opportunities for historians went further and launched a new field.

About 8,500 women attended the camps inspired by the CCC and organized by Eleanor Roosevelt—but the "She-She-She" program was mocked and eventually abandoned.

It can be hard to know what the Founders intended when they didn't know, either.

The swift, often comfortable ride on the Transcontinental Railroad opened up the American West to new settlement.

Thanks to the efforts of wealthy taxpayers, the "big reveal" of the 1920s was extremely short-lived.

Why did the man known as the “father of Black nationalism” defect to the Democratic Party during Reconstruction?

The first people to view our planet from the moon were transformed by the experience. In this film, they tell their story.

From grade school to college, students of color have suffered from the effects of biased testing.

She used her work to live an autonomous life in a time when women were often trapped by socially constructed gender roles and systematic oppression.

In 1871, the Wisconsin town Peshtigo burned to the ground, killing up to 2,500. But due to another event at the time, many have never heard about the disaster.

On Akhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us,” a new history of America’s constitutional conversation.

The classic story of the child down the well played out in Southern California at the dawn of television.

What has gone wrong with the modern environmental movement and its political organizing.

In Yoknapatawpha County, the past never speaks with a single voice.

A new book examines the ways white slaveholders were compensated, while formerly enslaved people were not.

Richard Cándida Smith on Ian Tyrrell’s "American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea."

While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.

Rejecting the resignation of the 1970s and ’80s, Robinson found in the disinvested ruins of the city a new egalitarian form of politics.

The author discusses Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight, racism in magazines, and why she’s so hopeful for the future of music and writing.

Revisiting MLK Jr.’s sermon against the Vietnam War.

Acknowledging the queer culture of the Harlem Renaissance is essential in order to paint a full picture of the period.

A history of the menthol cigarette and its effects on Black people.

Popular religious iconography and art in the decades preceding the Revolution offer a fuller narrative arc of the development of revolutionary ideas within American society.

When the US relaxed immigration restrictions in the late 50s, a small Egyptian population emerged. Their early experiences are now available via a new archive.

David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?

Cycling culture offered individual women, as well as couples, greater freedom in daily life.

Who were the early immigrants to America?

Why has Michigan continued to draw so many immigrants from the Arab world, creating one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East?

At the heart of my family tree are only questions and mysteries.

In the 1930s, a Seattle entrepreneur created a successful analog streaming platform—and ran it out of a drugstore.

To what degree can we blame automation for deindustrialization and class decomposition?

When Charles Sumner died in 1874, a bill he had sponsored two years earlier threatened to overshadow his legacy.

Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, is part of a long legacy of anti-gay rhetoric and legislation in the state.

A librarian with a love for eBay built this trove of culinary history.

The Dodgers great didn’t just break Major League Baseball’s color line. He was also an activist whose legacy reaches from Brooklyn to South Africa to Palestine.

Before Colin Kaepernick, Jackie Robinson wrote, ‘I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world.’