Excerpts

Digging deeper, offering historical context and going beyond official narratives will better serve the audience.

Exclusion and violence in Western U.S. states help explain the Whiteness of winter sports.

Why do some political incumbents adopt aggressive measures to slow the spread of infectious diseases while others do not?

One of the worst snowstorms recorded in Virginia’s history began on Sunday, January 17, 1857. It remained in Virginians' collective memories eighty years later.

Explorer Tara Roberts took up diving to learn about the human side of a tragic era. She wound up connecting with her family’s inspiring past.

The most influential preacher in the country, Beecher aggressively agitated for the Union to extend complete forgiveness to Confederates.

Restriction and deportation exist in opposition to the political traditions of the African American freedom struggle.

How Charlotta Bass, a Black woman and peace activist, anticipated America’s path to militarism.

Black contestants — and winners — have not translated into changed beauty standards or structural transformation.

Marie Bankhead Owen led campaigns to purge anti-Confederate lessons from Southern classrooms, and all but erased Black history from the Alabama state archives.

At the back of the book, the index provides a space for reference—and sometimes revenge.

After abandoning its working-class roots, the news business is in a death spiral as ordinary Americans reject it in growing numbers.

The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project explores the meaning of freedom through the example of one extraordinary life.

Long before the Wordle mania, there was the crossword puzzle craze. And newspapers condemned them as a dangerous menace to society.

After the 1927 Great Flood, Black musicians from the Delta produced an outpour of songs testifying to the destruction. The same is true today.

The dropout was not just a hippy-trippy hedonist but a paranoid soul, who feared brainwashing and societal control.

Slavery’s a sensitive subject, but so is the question of who gets to be an authority about language.

To control inflation during WWII, the U.S. government resorted to wide-ranging price controls. Unintended consequences may be the reason they aren't used today.

The crisis that Federici identified in the 1970s has reached a boiling point.

Fights over history like those in the U.S. are happening all over the world.

McCarthy imagined a vast border region where colonial empires clashed, tribes went to war, and bounty hunters roamed.

A brief history of their tangled saga of patriotism and dissent.

Crossword puzzles may be a recent invention, but since we've had language we've played games with words.

The United States often touts itself as a "nation of immigrants," but this obscures the real story.

The life of Guitar Shorty was a mixture of facts, lies and fantasy. He was a blues musician who lived far outside mainstream society.

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.

Meditations on when you think you found the people who owned your people via DNA test.

Cluelessness about Native people is rampant in New England, which romanticizes its Colonial heritage.

Whether exploring the dread of everyday life or the horrors of the occult, her ghost tales documented a nation haunted by isolation, class, and despair.

The discovery of the remains of the Clotilda, 160 years after it sank, brings new life and interest to the settlement built by the original survivors.

Mass lynchings of Black people following the Civil War.

The road to right-wing deregulation began on our nation's highways.

We looked at 138 formerly redlined cities and found most were still segregated — just like they were designed to be.

The 1619 Project and contested foundings.

An American conservatism which subtly or directly marginalizes the Founding is on a fast track to a conservatism at odds with America’s roots itself.

Daina Ramey Berry details the life of the outspoken activist Sojourner Truth and her legendary speaking tour.

Once Peter Parker received his miraculous spider powers, the last thing he wanted to do was go out and get a colorful costume and fight crime.

Vaccine skepticism and misinformation have persisted since the smallpox epidemics. With the internet, it's only gotten worse.

How rooting for American athletes became part of Olympic TV coverage.

It is in the hidden spaces of American empire that the realities of power can truly be seen.

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking.

The island was once a place of working-class ingenuity and Black daring.

The life of Judah Benjamin, a Southern Jew who served in the Confederate government, can tell us only so much about the American Jewish encounter with slavery.

Efforts to clamp down on White House leaks to the press follow a pattern that was set during the Nixon era after the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

The daughter and granddaughter of a former internee return to the notorious WWI-era detention site for Japanese-Americans.

East European Jews and the lost world of immigrant banking.

Our secular government is all tangled up with God. How did we get here?

Of mice and men.

When Sidney Poitier slapped a white murder suspect on screen, it changed how the stories of Black Americans were portrayed on film.

Trump’s shredding of paper in the White House was far more widespread and indiscriminate than previously known.