Excerpts

Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all illnesses—including COVID-19—are social problems for humans to solve.

Fears that teachers were indoctrinating kids were rampant in the 1950s. But the reality was more complicated.

Material benefits trumped FDR's terrible civil rights records.

With chatter about Texas leaving the union on the rise, two new books remind us what it was like the last time we tried to go it alone.

Ordinances, arrests, and celebrations during the influenza epidemic.

And the "gentleman" doctors who made them.

When I spoke with my boyhood hero 25 years after his famous home run, I learned why he’d kept going through the death threats and the hate.

Debunking the myth that the great national park was a wilderness untouched by humans

The vision of feminist labor organizing that guided the women’s white-collar organizing project 9to5 should still be our north star.

Absent social media, the artists of the past shaped public knowledge of historical events through illustrations.

Fears about “undeserving” people receiving public assistance have deep ties to racism and the policing of black women’s bodies.

From Bronze Age farmers to New World colonialists, the stories of struggle to claim more ground have shaped where and how we live.

In ACT UP, belonging was not conferred by blood. Care was offered when you joined others on the street with the intent to bring the AIDS crisis to an end.

In 1964, the John Birch Society was the most active far-right group in the United States—unless you count the Republican Party.

Only 15 nightlife spaces dedicated to queer and gay women remain in the United States

Lessons about organizing from the SNCC co-founder.

A return to the fairness doctrine wouldn't curb the damage caused by the far-right media ecosystem fueling much of America's conspiracy-driven politics.

We must be cautious of the inclination to find a “usable history” that proves those points we want to prove, that reinforces the lessons we want reinforced.

It's a sign of disrespect.

Thousands of pages of declassified records are available for anyone to peruse.

How a Gilded Age best seller shaped American race discourse.

How not to learn about the American past.

States have a legitimate way to influence national politics. Forcing their will on other states isn't it.

On the ten year anniversary of Aziz Rana's book, Henry Brooks interviews him on his influential book and what it might teach us about the legacies of populism.

Far from a partisan for free markets, the Founding Father insisted on the need for economic planning. We need more of that vision today.

An oral history with 25 fashion luminaries, highlighting a previously untold history of the AIDS crisis.

Research shows that visitors often ignore information that conflicts with what they already believe about history.

Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong.

The penny press of the nineteenth century was a revolution in newspapers—and is a salutary reminder of lost ties between reporters and readers.

The 1898 Wilmington insurrection showed “how people could get murdered in the streets and no one held accountable for it.”

Pioneering cartoonists were experimental, satiric, erotic, and artistically ambitious.

How difficult was it to obtain artificial light before the 19th century? Well...

For decades, the Republican Party has used what's known as "the Southern Strategy" to win white support in the region.

A new biography of the pioneering doctors shows why “first” can be a tricky designation.

We must remember the very real challenges to the preservation of our democracy.

From covid-19 to the 2020 election, the specter of America’s racist history influences many aspects of our lives.

There’s no reason we can’t have universal childcare that’s wildly popular and provides high-quality care — in fact, during World War II, we did.

As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law,” declared the man who would be America’s sixteenth president.

Disunion is hardly a new theme in American politics. In this moment of tumult, it would be unwise to rule out its return.

This op-ed celebrates the life and legacy of economist, attorney, and civil rights advocate Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander.

By the end of his life, inspired by the radicalism of the Black Panthers, Baldwin was again ready to proclaim himself a socialist.

After the Capitol was cleared of insurrectionists on January 6, it wasn't lost on many that cleaning up the mess would fall largely to Black and Brown people.

Then as now, not many people were willing to raise their own voices to defend the speech of a vulgarian spewing hate over a mass medium.

The aesthetics of virtual reality, and its promise of “magical” embodied experience, can be found in older experiments with immersive media.

The storming of the Capitol was an expression of the antidemocratic strands in American history.

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

The answer can change over time.

Unlike our car dashboards, covid-19 dashboards do not give individuals actionable information.