Excerpts

The cosmic delusions of Elon Musk and Wernher von Braun.

Holt Cemetery has been filled to capacity many times over; each gravesite has been used for dozens of burials.

The history of unpleasant odor, or miasma, has unexpected relevance in the time of COVID-19.

When editors believed their magazines could change lives.

A leading expert on financial crises explains how the pandemic is upending economic orthodoxy and raising the stakes of the 2020 election.

The late historian and author of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” misdiagnosed the fate of modern conservatism.

By naming a common enemy the Union Army was able to build and then steer a coalition of Americans toward the systematic destruction of slavery.

The systematic mass murder and assault of accused communists in Indonesia by US-backed military forces has left a mark on the country and the world.

How a party spent decades making itself white.

In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.

We can learn more from him in today's political world.

The suburbs of Atlanta, where I grew up in an era still scarred by segregation, have transformed in ways that helped deliver Joe Biden the presidency.

Four decades of “Jeopardy!” contestants tell the story of Alex Trebek’s rise from affable Canadian TV host to cultural icon.

Enslaved children were used in medical trials for early smallpox vaccines. They have been forgotten.

He devoted a lifetime to studying America’s foundation, witnessed its near-dissolution, and uncannily anticipated its evolution.

US monuments and memorials have overlooked frontline workers and people of color affected by past epidemics. Will we repeat history?

Censure brought down a crusading anti-communist senator but fired up his followers.

It never has.

Today's heated political arguments over censorship and misinformation online are rooted in a 26-word snippet of a law that created the Internet as we know it.

The mysterious appeal of my first detective.

On the symptoms and spread of Newyorkitis.

Remembering the Ohio State Penitentiary Hurricanes—and the day my father played against them in 1965.

The 1980s brought about America's gym obsession—and a machine that demands a notoriously grueling cardio workout

Bribery! Impeachment! Drug smuggling! Gambling! Justices getting drunk in the chambers!

Joe Biden was once a New Deal Democrat. Then he “evolved” and starting backing decades of Republican plans to cut Medicare and Social Security.

In southwest Florida, the Myakka River Valley — a place of mystery and myth — is under threat of development.

Sixty years ago, a sharecropper’s son invented a technology to identify faces. The record of his role all but vanished. Who was Woody Bledsoe, and who was he working for?

More than iron, stone, or oil, wood explains human history.

Horseback travel time is only part of the story.

Once the COVID crisis is over, it may take us quite some time to process and psychologically recover from this tragedy.

The artists of our time, with their ruin-porn coffee-table books, offer the world a glossy, anesthetized image of abandoned infrastructure from Chernobyl to Detroit.

Throughout American history, philanthropy has involved the offering of time, money and moral concern to benefit others, but it carries a complicated legacy.

The activists of the 1990s worked so diligently that they were written out of history.

Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America, embodying both its tumult and its promise.

The collapse of John C. Calhoun's statue created a sound not unlike artillery in the war he influenced.

The intertwining of white flour, nutrition science, and profit.

Katherine Fite and the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, 1945.

The fight between Biden and conservative Catholics will be about more than policy.

Enslaved.org will allow anyone to search for individual enslaved people around the globe in one central online location.

It’s been two hundred years since America’s first sci-fi novel was published. But who wrote it?

A food writer cracks into the power of food memories and what deviled eggs might tell us about who we are and who we might become.

How scientific thought informed colonization and religious conversion during the Age of Discovery.

Why removing the names of Confederates from military bases matters.

The militant abolitionist's execution set a precedent for armed resistance against the federal government with implications for those who had condemned him.

Jack Kennedy, we hardly know ye—and to know ye is not to love ye.

The West and the nation need worthier, more honest memorials.

Many Americans were living under quarantines, and officials warned people to stay home for the holiday.

In his time, the 16th president drew comparisons to a famous tightrope walker.

Alex Winter’s new documentary about the musician fails to capture his deeply conventional streak.

At 91, Harrison Ruffin Tyler demonstrates that "long ago" wasn't so long ago.