Excerpts

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.

The Washington Post has compiled the first database of slaveholding members of Congress by examining thousands of census records and historical documents.

By following the money, a new history of urban inequality turns our attention away from federal malfeasance and toward capital markets and financial instruments.

The Equal Rights Amendment sparked debate from its very beginning, even among many of the women who had worked together for suffrage.

The history of American policing shows that it was designed to eat up resources and subjugate the civilian population.

The context in which King shared his views on the filibuster is the same one in which the Senate now finds itself: amid battles over voting rights legislation.

Amid calls to defund police, cops are framing themselves as victims. We must remember who is really being brutalized.

So many people taught us to be more than the hatred heaped upon us.

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.

She has become an icon of American letters. Now readers are reckoning with another side of her legacy.

Corporate deregulation has long curtailed OSHA’s power to safeguard workers.

He forced the country to engage in a three-year conversation about the meaning of free speech that shaped policy and law after World War I.

The New Deal's legacies of infrastructure and economic development, and entrenching structural racism, reveal the potential and mistakes to avoid for the Green New Deal.

Old-growth trees in Alaska's Tongass National Forest are embroiled in the politics of timber and climate change.

The memoirs of Korean adoptees, once full of confession and confusion, are now marked by confidence and rage.

The melody occupies a niche space at the intersection of ice cream, entertainment, and Black history.

What the Confederacy actually was: a proslavery anti-democratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.

Why do the Transcendentalists still have an outsize influence on American culture?

Democracy is in trouble, but a lawless coup isn’t the real threat.

In rejecting Plessy’s argument that the Jim Crow law implied Black people were inferior, the Supreme Court upheld the notion of “separate but equal.”

The life of Daniel Boone underlines how the North America of the era was a welter of conflict among and between natives and Europeans.

How the authors of the Depression-era “Business Plot” aimed to take power away from FDR and stop his “socialist” New Deal.

To understand the right’s plans for Babbitt, look to George Shiffler.

Long after the end of explicit discrimination in the housing market, the federal government continued to manage risk for capital, perpetuating inequality.

Plastic production just keeps expanding, and now is becoming a driving cause of climate change.

The past provides a key lesson to minimize the damage from the omicron surge.

Even before mass media coverage of child abductions, American parents had reason to fear the worst if their child went missing.

David Ruggles' fight against the "kidnapping club" in the 1830s shows that police violence has been part of America's DNA from its earliest days.

Most adult men could aspire to participation in the religious and political government of the colony. But this communal liberty did not imply personal liberty.

Scholarly accounts of slavery have been changing, but these correctives sometimes say more about historians than the historical subjects they're writing about.

What a video of an Jan. 6 insurrectionist illustrates about race, religion, and nationalism in the MAGA movement.

An Illinois high school teacher explains how his state complicates the binary of “free states” and “slave states.”

A new volume of Robert Frost’s letters finds him at the height of his artistic powers while suffering an almost unimaginable series of losses.

Through slavery, Indian boarding schools, Japanese internment, mass incarceration, and anti-Communist wars against civilian populations in Latin America.

Harmony Holiday dreams of a Black sound unfettered by white desire.

New evidence shows what the 30-foot-tall Confederate memorial was actually meant to commemorate.  

“What if we identified the politics of municipal debt as circumscribing political horizons and futures?”

The NFL holiday tradition took off in 1934, when the Detroit Lions hosted the unbeaten Chicago Bears in a game broadcast nationally on radio.

The statesman was embarrassed by the mishap—no doubt a murder most fowl.

A storm is never just wind or rain. Our natural problems are social problems. The solutions to them must be social, too.

African American activists have long coupled these efforts with fighting against racist laws and racial violence.

Spontaneous strikes led by the working class in 1877 resulted in violent clashes with police.

The American exchange organizers were unaware that the German pupils and staff were charged with an explicitly propagandistic mission.

For the white-robed, playing a black team was a gift-wrapped photo op, a chance to show that the Klan was part of the local community.

Americans of the interwar period were perfectly clear about one fact we have lost sight of today: all fascism is indigenous, by definition.

It was intended to be a tool of political power, sending a message against Black voting and serving as a gathering point for the Ku Klux Klan.

Many people celebrate the U.S. as a nation of immigrants, but nativism has infused its politics from the outset.