Excerpts

The rise and fall of Perry Miller.

Biden’s vision may conflict with promoting purported American values such as democracy and human rights.

Without a more fundamental transformation of criminal law, public defenders often provide only a limited form of equality and fairness before the law.

After World War II, American power on the world stage was defined by internationalism and cooperation.

Socialised investment and the spectre of full employment.

Any effective soul-searching must take into account the history of white American Christian support for white supremacist power.

The experience of feeling in the archive.

Ukulele Ike, otherwise known as Cliff Edwards, was a major American pop star and an important early force in jazz. It’s time to give him another hearing.

The gadget that taught the world to socially distance.

We’re still dealing with the repercussions of a discredited 1998 study that sowed fear and skepticism about vaccines.

The intersecting lives of robber barons and floundering French aristocrats.

Michael Lobel on Confederate memorials and the history of “degenerate art."

We haven’t built many memorials to panics, recessions, or depressions, but maybe we should.

Perhaps the lesson to take from this year of living online is not about making better technology. It’s about recognizing technology’s limits.

Reckoning with our past is crucial to getting buy-in for the vaccine.

Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans consider John Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.

The enchanted terms in which F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed modern America still blind us to how scathingly he judged it.

Black women in Georgia have shaped local and state politics for more than a century.

If Trump was the end of the “party of ideas,” the rise of Reagan was its start. But what were those “ideas” in the first place, and were they really as new as people said?

For a century, critics of all political stripes have challenged the role of science in society. Repairing distrust requires confronting those arguments head on.

Tracing the twisting path of a resistance slogan, from the Nazis to the hippies to Trump.

The confluence of Black and Indigenous history at Bdote.

The murders in Duluth offered yet another example that the North was no exception when it came to anti-black violence.

The controversial version of the U.S. flag has been hailed as a sign of police solidarity and criticized as a symbol of white supremacy.

How municipal debt contributed to the development of white America and underdevelopment of Black America.

The document counted my great-great-grandfather as 3/5 of a free person. But the Framers don’t own the version we live by today. We do.

A collage artist explores how Louisiana's ecological and epidemiological disasters are founded in colonialism.

Cuts to public services that might mitigate poverty and promote social mobility have become a perpetual excuse for more policing.

Centrist Democrats who blamed the left for election losses would do well to remember the people who have fought for and shaped the party’s history.

Frank B. Wilderson III sketches a map of the world in which Black people are everywhere integral but always excluded.

Reflections on reading Nietzsche in Alaska in the early days of Covid-19.

How the movement that’s changing America was built and where it goes next.

Before antibiotics, a scratch or blister could lead to death. Who knew this all could change with a little mold?

In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He was right.

All empires fall. When they do, the violence and terror they’ve wrought on others has a way of coming back around.

When J.F.K. ran for President, a team of data scientists with powerful computers set out to model and manipulate American voters. Sound familiar?

You can’t understand the history of American energy use without them. A new visual history puts them in context.

The treasures include recordings of string quartets, spirituals, sermons and politicians who might have been startled to hear the sound of their own voices.

In the 1960s, youth counterculture spawned Christian rock.

Pandemics can only be contained through organized collaboration and cooperative diplomacy.

Uniting for better wages and working conditions, a remarkably diverse coalition of laborers faced off against agribusiness.

On Facebook's 15th anniversary, Harvard students and faculty reflect on being the first users of Earth's largest social network.

Cartoons have often been considered exempt from the country’s prejudices. In fact, they form a genre built on the marble and mud of racial signification.

Once a symbol of desegregation, Ruby Bridges’ school now reflects another battle engulfing public education.

The author goes looking for the history of telecommunication, and is left sitting in the slim shadow of a lightning rod, listening to a voice from beyond the grave.

Despite calling himself a feminist, the author of the Foundation stories was a serial harasser.

Winthrop's specimens illustrated an alteration of the New World environment and the political economy of New England according to Winthrop's careful designs.

When we think of early New England, we picture stern-faced Puritans. But in the same decade that they arrived, Morton founded a very different kind of colony.

Nanyehi “Nancy” Ward tried to broker peace with white settlers.

Dying of dysentery was just the beginning.