Excerpts

For more than a century, Western oil companies have cycled into and out of Russia.

Why did William F. Buckley campaign to free Edgar Smith?

A review of ”Man Ray: The Artist and His Shadows” by Arthur Lubow.

These things happen, in all our Harlems, every single day. If we ignore this fact, and our common responsibility to change this fact, we are sealing our doom.

Let us let the ghosts of the megafauna rise, but let us leave the old imperialists to lie in their graves undisturbed.

Family paintings led me to a revolutionary society my mother’s grandfather was a member of and whose story was interwoven with Eastern European Jews.

Congress hasn't declared it often. The U.S. has fought a lot of war anyway. How?

The fate of the League of Nations provides a stark warning about using sanctions as a tool of modern warfare.

Political activists Greta Thunberg and Helen Keller have been just as misunderstood by their supporters as by their detractors.

A Black cowboy named George McJunkin found a site that would transform views about the history of Native Americans in North America.

The 1872 act that established the nature preserve provoked Lakota assertions of sovereignty.

NATO expansion - the trigger for Russia's attack on Ukraine?

Japanese Americans enter the frame of everyday Midwestern lives.

During the American Revolution, the British 29th Regiment had a tradition of including Black drummers into its ranks.

On the evening of 16 December 1835, a fire broke out near Wall Street. It swept away 674 buildings and though devastation seemed absolute, citizens quickly rebuilt.

Built on the momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom.

American pundits say Putin is undermining the international order. But the ability of great powers to ignore the rules is a lamentable part of the system.

A history of imperial forgetting.

A review of “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War."

His approval rating hit historic lows, his party was fractious, crises were everywhere. But Truman rescued his presidency, and his legacy.

The history of the left in the United States is a history of betrayal.

The history of the movement is one of unlikely success. But what can we learn from embattled experiments like prescribed heroin? 

The language sustained a Jewish diasporan secular culture. Today, that heritage survives in a gritty corner of Queens to be claimed by a new generation.

Roscoe Conkling was a successful politician and an able lawyer. But the colorful and irascible senator had no desire to serve on the high court.

The Great Migration in the 20th century changed the face of America. For the past few decades, it's been reversing.

Brothel guides tended to be small, making them easy to conceal. They also mimicked other publications to make it easier to hide the guides’ true purpose.

Six days after 9/11, the FBI raided a Detroit sleeper cell. But, despite a celebrated conviction, there was one problem — they’d gotten it wrong.

The idea of liberty has often seemed to mean freedom from government and its spending. But there is an alternate history, one just as foundational and defining.

Jackalopes have migrated from Wyoming across the nation, but what’s really known about the mythical creature?

A woman who repeatedly challenged racial violence and the prejudiced systems protecting its perpetrators.

In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, the victory of racial prejudice over democratic principle and the rule of law was unnervingly complete.

Driven by fears of the rise of communism, the U.S. intervened in elections across the globe. In Latin America, the consequences are still being felt.

A look back at the early years of the 350-year-old institution that once claimed a vast portion of the globe.

The Kent State shootings further widened the chasm among a citizenry divided over the Vietnam War.

Though some have likened it to Sodom and Gomorrah, New York City has a long history of religious vibrancy.

In Colonial Williamsburg, a neglected Christian past is being restored.

The question of how to balance state and national power was perhaps the single most important and most challenging question confronting the early republic.

These Quakers led some of the early campaigns against sugar being produced by enslaved people.

The musical traditions found in contemporary Black U.S. and Caribbean Christian worship originated hundreds of years ago, continents away.

The history of French settlement in "le pays des Illinois" is not well-known by Americans, and what is known is being revisited by historians.

The first black settlers in the U.S. West.

In the new nonfiction collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” what emerges is a writer who mastered a Black idiom but seldom championed race pride.

Why three religious groups traded monogamy for celibacy, polygamy, and complex marriage.

The organic compounds that enabled industrialization are having unintended consequences for the planet’s life.

No matter the outcome of West Virginia v. EPA, the agency can take action to engage the public and make its data more accessible.

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.

Southern pro-slavery states weren't the only states calling for disunion before the Civil War erupted.

The 1954 US nuclear tests absolutely devastated the small island nation, but the US has steadfastly refused to make real amends for it.

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

Most Americans probably don’t know this piece of Black history. But they should.