Excerpts

In World War I, the Victory Garden movement encouraged people to grow their own food to conserve home-front supplies. But kids' gardens had planted the roots.

Insuring against the cost of insurance itself in Revolutionary-era America.

Union activists linked the struggle for black equality in housing, employment, and at the ballot box, to the broader struggle against capitalist domination.

During World War II, a group of African American sailors was chosen to integrate the Naval Officer Corps, forever changing what was possible in the U.S. Navy.

Pheasants? 'Dickory dock'? Toyland? Here's how a narrow slice of American history changed the holidays forever.

The best-selling musical artist in the world in 1969, Johnny Cash sang of (and for) the "forgotten Americans": the imprisoned men of all races.

The farm tractor wasn’t born overnight. Perfecting it led to a three-way battle between Ford, John Deere and International Harvester.

The story of President Andrew Jackson's 1,400-pound block of cheese.

Promoters and performers in pro wrestling began increasingly prizing entertainment value over maintaining the appearance of legitimate contests.

Almon F. Rockwell's newly resurfaced journals, excerpted exclusively here, offer an incisive account of the assassinated presidents' final moments.

The trailblazing Black labor leader and civil rights activist took her fight for equality from the packinghouse to the pulpit.

Before the rise of macroeconomics that accompanied World War II, price determination was a central problem of economic thought.

'Did slavery make home always somewhere else?'

You can't tell the story of Midwestern cities like Toledo without being honest about their white supremacy problems.

Actions by the medical profession in the 1970s still reverberate today.

When states began restricting labor by children, verifying a person's age became an important means of enforcement.

A new book shows just how porous the dividing line has been between the far right and mainstream conservatism.

From the Black Panthers to the Communist Party, radical Los Angeles in the ’60s was a seething cauldron of unrest, united by the brutal repression of the LAPD.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the galvanizing voice of the civil rights struggle, an uncompromising, complicated figure who soared in the pulpit.

Our newest culinary trend is also our oldest.

Politics have diluted King's dream.

For less fortunate New Yorkers, access to safe, adequate heating has never been assured.

Most people think of Martin Luther King Jr. as a civil rights leader. What many don’t know is that he also championed labor unionism.

King Jr., remembered today for his non-violent resistance, was a radical reformer who called for fundamental redistribution of economic power and resources.

The temperance movement wasn’t an example of American exceptionalism; it was a globe-spanning network of activists and politicians against economic exploitation.

A new film shows how Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, stood up to a majority-white city council to push through infrastructure improvements for all.

The poet’s memoir Generations is both a chronicle of her ancestral lineage and lesson in the centrality of Black women to the story of American history.

This grassroots movement brought occupational health to American labor, paving the way for the creation of OSHA.

How more than a century of whitewashed history poisons Alabama today.

The Bleeding Kansas parallels with our current moment get weirder and darker.

A long heritage of black preachers who played an important role for enslaved people shaped Martin Luther King Jr.‘s moral and ethical vision.

Before the Civil War, US activists sought to combat slavery through sugar boycotts. Instead, consumption grew.

Somewhere in Jamaica survive the original cannabis strains that were not burned by American agents or bred to be more profitable.

A leading historian of Madison's political thought explains that the framer "did not believe in minority rule."

Influenza pandemic of 1918 in the United States.

As people have gathered across the country to oppose police violence, they have targeted statues, monuments, and buildings commemorating white supremacy.

The American yam is not the food it says it is. How that came to be is a story of robbery, reinvention, and identity.

In the early 20th century, labor unrest and strike breaking were done not by the government, but by private agencies and self-appointed vigilantes.

How abortion activists responded in the wake of the 1989 Webster decision and what we can learn from their efforts.

J. Edgar Hoover had both of them in his sights. Yet neither one was ever arrested. The untold story of how the Hall brothers beat the FBI.

"The problem is the way policing was built," historian Khalil Muhammad says.

America has a love affair with “productive leisure.”

What turned Smedley Butler into a critic of American foreign policy?

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.

Suburbs are getting more diverse, but that doesn't mean they’re woke.

Is there something in particular about coming from a Native background that makes a person want to write and perform comedy?

When it comes to intellectual partnerships, sometimes an acknowledgment is enough.

A riveting new book shows how the Civil War in the West was both strategically important and lacking in the moral contours of the broader war.

Access to information only goes so far to explain the curious link between secrets and those who tell them.

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overstate the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.