Excerpts

A new feminist history of women and exercise glosses over the darker side of fitness culture.

The fevered hunt for basic symbols.

The music industry is thriving — but it’s not always trickling down to artists.

The Panamanian garment worker turned labor organizer, Pan-Africanist, and anti-colonial activist advocated for US and African workers amid a Cold War freeze.

Fewer fires are burning worldwide than at any time since antiquity. But in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable.

The conservative plot to suppress the Black vote has relied on racist caricatures, then and now.

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

They’ve just been sitting in the dining room all this time.

For decades, America’s governing elite caricatured sensible restraint in order to pursue geopolitical dominance and endless wars. At last the folly may be over.

Cocktails — the ingredients, the stories, the pageantry — can reveal more than expected about the Gilded Age.

Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations.

Environment, British occupation, and The winter of 1779-1780.

In Maryland, a memorial for two lynching victims reveals how America is grappling with its history of racial terror.

The inequitable dismissal of US soldiers following the conclusion of the Civil War.

Yes, the Russian leader is an authoritarian aggressor. But different decisions at key points by the U.S. might have made him less so.

For far too long, Americans have used football to sell the ideas of democracy and fair play. But for Black America, this is an illusion.

The Lehman Trilogy proposes that the downfall of a financial dynasty is enough to tell the economic and political history of America.

How to hide an empire, from the Spanish-American war to CIA-sponsored Latin American coups.

Hiding behind "academic freedom," E. O. Wilson actively propagated race pseudoscience in collusion with white supremacists.

Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. discusses his new memoir.

When the river freezes, lives change.

84 years ago this week, this Mexican American labor organizer led one of the largest strikes in Texas history—and was arrested and blacklisted for her trouble.

A document thought lost to history shows how Sojourner Truth became the first Black woman to successfully sue white men to get her son released from slavery.

Because of consistent government intervention in the industry, we might call fast food the quintessential cuisine of global capitalism.

Margaret Wise Brown constantly pushed boundaries—in her life and in her art.

And why spying on the “bums” has been terrible for schools.

Normalization of deviance is a useful concept that was developed to explain how the Challenger disaster happened.

Who was Dave Prater?

Why did a local official, at the turn of the twentieth century, maintain a ledger tracking Chinese residents?

The different ways news media approaches pandemic reporting.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said America faces an economic crisis fifty years in the making. But how can we name the long crisis, much less explain it?

Rampant outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics are the culprits.

Unable to bear the shame of being captured as a prisoner of war, Shoichi Yokoi hid in the jungles of Guam until January 1972.

Over the past century, the United States came to rely ever more on economic coercion—with questionable results.

In her lifetime, Dorothy Day rejected canonization for herself. Now revived, this bad idea would only diminish the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

A 1763 massacre by colonial settlers exposed the the irreconcilable contradictions of conquest by people concerned with civility.

There are revelations in a newly digitized collection of slave narratives compiled by a professor and his students during the Great Depression.

On Raoul Peck's "Exterminate all the Brutes" and the limits of rewriting the narrative.

The Resettlement Administration was one of the New Deal’s most radical, far-reaching, and highly criticized programs, and it lasted just two years.

Much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy in the news today is similar to a movement that swept the country 20 years ago.

The women of May 19th bombed the U.S. Capitol and plotted Henry Kissinger’s murder. But they’ve been long forgotten.

In June 1942, Kenji and just over one hundred other children were taken from their parents and relocated to Manzanar.

Confederates’ quest for bones connects to a bizarre history of the use, and misuse, of human remains.

How the rise of alternative, "natural," medicines led Americans to equate food with moral character.

What else is lost when an object disappears?

The Bidens' new cat Willow will be the first feline in the White House since the George W. Bush years, but is part of a long tradition.

Early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years.

Year-by-year maps of homesteading claims and the dispossession of Native Americans.

How can historic data about segregation, redlining, and real estate be more accessible? In this interview, we dive into a new data set derived from HOLC maps.

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?