Excerpts

Political scientist Jacob Hacker explains how we wound up with a healthcare system so different from the European model, and why lobbyists hold so much sway.

The American method of high-risk, potentially high-reward investments has fueled innovation from New England whaling ventures to Silicon Valley start-ups.

"The Conqueror" was filmed downwind of a nuclear test site. A new documentary tells the story of the fatal film set, and the community affected.

A new graphic book unpacks the role that some White women played in suppressing voting rights for all — and the lessons today in the fight for universal ballot access.

Without the local San Francisco activists who risked their lives for it, today’s legal cannabis market might never have come to be.

After the apocalypse that wasn’t.

"To believe that the richness of Black identity can be understood through a temporary costume trivializes the lifelong trauma of racism. It turns the complexity of Black life into a stunt."

In the 1960s, civil rights activist Floyd McKissick successfully sold President Nixon on an idea of a black built, black-owned community in North Carolina.

Hollywood's first natural-color feature film and the breakout role for Anna May Wong, considered the first Chinese American movie star.

Tracing the origins of Japanese emoji symbolism and drawing technology.

For the players in the First World War, the goal was not to prevail but to avoid being seen as the loser.

Many LGBTQ+ veterans settled in the city as it was a common point of disembarkation and a place of gender nonconformity.

Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence announced a new epoch in world history, transforming a provincial tax revolt into a great struggle to liberate humanity.

The Supreme Court’s expanding interpretation of the Second Amendment threatens longstanding democratic authority to enact gun safety measures.

How the Federalist Society became the engine of the conservative legal movement—and where it might be headed next.

He wrote one of my favorite songs, but was so much more than a composer.

The Founders knew that executive power was vital but dangerous in any republic.

No one really knows how interest rates work—not the experts who study them, the investors who track them, or the officials who set them.

Siskel and Ebert and the heyday of popular movie criticism.

The story of how Harriet Tubman led 150 African American soldiers to rescue over 700 former slaves freed five months earlier by the Emancipation Proclamation.

How the focus on Harlem obfuscated Black culture in the Midwest.

Tracing financial capital—from J. P. Morgan to BlackRock.

The American public is more susceptible than ever to skewed narratives.

America never really was liberal, and that’s not the right fight anyway. The fight now is for democracy.

A shocking image of the 1906 atrocity survived but failed to become a humanitarian touchstone.

Panic about Catholics, Freemasons, and, later, Jews, is deeply woven into American history, and forms the basis of our fertile culture of conspiracy theorizing.

The latest biography of the great transcendentalist captures the paradoxes of his Yankee mind.

Neoliberalism isn’t just a set of economic precepts—it’s also an architecture of laws passed to reinforce those precepts. Those laws must be changed.

Myths to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars.

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing.

American foreign aid to Israel has long relied on the support of American Jews. But American Jews have never been unified in their support for Israel.

The question of villainy has always been a complicated issue for African Americans in film.

A century ago, the party took a record 103 ballots and 16 days of intense, violent debate to choose a presidential nominee.

A new book conveys in dramatic detail what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery. Another addresses the love of God and country that helped her do so.

Think this year’s Democratic convention is going to be nuts? One hundred years ago, Democrats took 103 ballots—and more than two weeks—to choose a candidate.

Appeals against the war in Gaza are often framed through the lens of the future: “You will regret having been silent.” What about the present tense?

John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke” renders the signal political battles of the present in an entirely new light.

Looking back on the environmentalist and anti-globalization movements of the 1990s.

Despite wrenching economic and political changes in the country, Democrats and Republicans keep finding themselves nearly tied in election after election.

How Earhart and other women pilots of her day helped overcome Americans’ skepticism about flight.

On the Loyalists who fled during the Revolutionary War – like Jacob Bailey, who saw freedom from tyranny with the British in Nova Scotia.

An exhibition in Seattle spotlights the Black artists and performers who called Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden home between the 1930s and the 1980s.

On the transformation of Mary Harris into Mother Jones.

The fight over nuclear waste on Yucca Mountain.

U.S. imperialism and private enterprise in the region have created ecological peril.

The Phrygian cap, also known as the liberty cap, emerged as a potent symbol in 18th-century America and France.

The law is routinely blamed for a very real problem it had nothing to do with.

A touristy dive bar, an unfinished liberation movement, and now a visitor center for the National Park Service.

An archaeologist explains why a museum keeps so many bones from the Jones-Miller site, an ice age bison kill on the North American plains.

Union workers in the US weapons industry present a paradox for anti-war labor activists, but a history of “conversion” campaigns offers a route.