Excerpts

In 1965, eight years before Roe v. Wade, an anonymous woman described the steps she took to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

National Football League pre- and postgame shows have become a testing ground for novel technology in the waning days of linear television.

This 1969 film offers a compelling context for queer cinema and culture prior to the 1970s.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s plane is starting to look like itself again.

In 2024, the U.S. faces some of the same challenges in the region that it did in 1954.

In an age when the White House is being asked if slavery was a good or bad thing, perhaps we should take a look at the history of the history of slavery.

The power of history, numbers, and nostalgia.

The signs that precede the crumbling of American political parties and the creation of new ones.

Trump’s language about immigrants “poisoning” the U.S. repeats past rhetoric that led to civilian detention camps, with horrific, tragic results.

It's misleading, invidious, and it obscures what's actually bad and scary about right-wing nationalist foreign policy.

The federal minimum wage has not risen in over 15 years. We analyze why.

A recent paper provides evidence that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study reduced the life expectancy of African-American men.

“The most underrated president” was a model of successful governance in a world in flux.

A century ago, the Flexner Report led to the closure of 75% of U.S. medical schools. It still explains a lot about today’s unequal access to healthcare.

From loading up the Wayback Machine to 72 hours of scraping, journalists are doing what they can to keep their clips when websites go dark.

It has been 90 years since Ossian Sweet tried to move into his new home; since police stood by and did nothing as a mob threw rocks.

On the private and public lives of the author of “The Fire Next Time” and “Giovanni’s Room.”

When picture postcards began circulating with a frenzy at the turn of the 20th century, a certain motif proved popular: photographs of people posed with books.

What was the Popular Front? Where did it come from, and where did its energies go?

Ask George Washington.

How I learned the story of the My Lai Massacre.

An interactive map of lynching markers in the United States.

Samuel Roth was the sort of bookseller whose wares came wrapped in brown paper.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the age of surveillance.

Created for US insurance firms during devastating fires across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Sanborn maps blaze with detail the aspects of American cities.

Consequences mattered to the Founders—and that meant early American judges upheld major gun restrictions.

In 1943, a Harvard librarian was quietly recruited by the OSS to save the scattered books of Europe.

Before they even learn the details, adherents already know the outcome of real world events. The white guy will be the good guy, no matter what.

Rumors of a link between Prescott Bush and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. They were right.

Over the 1830s, Hamblin transformed the fortunes of the Bowery by featuring melodramas starring young women, but this wasn't without issues.

On Nathanael Greene’s inauspicious start.

Why few Native Americans are celebrating the centennial of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

John Ganz offers a whirlwind tour of the cranks, conservatives, and con artists who helped remake the American right at the turn of the 21st century.

Edwin Forrest’s 1851 divorce trial.

Reports in the underground press demonstrate how Juneteenth has been celebrated as both a social and political gathering in the twentieth century.

“Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing…” — James Joyce, Ulysses

“Who controls the past,” George Orwell wrote, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” So it has been with baseball.

When it became clear that the United States and its allies couldn’t “liberate” Eastern Europe through psychological war and covert ops, they turned to sports.

Smog first came to Los Angeles suddenly, like a stranded hitchhiker. It was July 8th, 1943, and we were at war.

Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?

The magical in-betweenness—and surprising epidemiological history—of the porch.

Jewish masculinity and the New York intellectuals.

In many ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for grown-ups.

The cottages’ modest design provided entry-level homes after the Great Chicago Fire.

Skateboarding was considered a silly and childish phenomenon for much of its existence.

Black wet nurses made a show of militance in 1937.

Far from a novel form of populism, J. D. Vance’s appeals are indistinguishable from the economic vision of the 1970s John Birch Society.

Retracing the history of Chinatown in Los Angeles using old Chinese restaurant menus as a guide.

A tour through the travel journals that visually document early road trips of the American West.

The conflict between Red and Blue America is a clash of national mythologies.