Excerpts

"The Road to Unfreedom," Timothy Snyder's book on Russian influence around the world, is built on contradiction and conspiracy.

Comparing Trump's America to fascist Germany only fuels elites' antidemocratic fantasies.

How the U.S. government used veterans as atomic guinea pigs.

Black veterans were once targeted for racialized violence because of the equality with whites that their military service implied.

Black people emerged from the war bloodied and scarred. Still, the war marked a turning point in their struggles for freedom.

The chaotic quest to mythologize America’s past.

On the mournful threads connecting his half-century in politics.

Jaime Harrison lost to Lindsey Graham but expanded Democrats’ vision of what’s possible in the Deep South.

A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.

Today's housing crisis in San Francisco originates from zoning laws that segregated racial groups and income levels.

On the passage and enforcement of laws to exclude or deport immigrants for their beliefs, and the people who challenged those laws.

Procedures drive the bottom line in our medical system.

The forgotten crusade of Morris Milgram.

White families quickly recuperated financial losses after the Civil War, then created a Jim Crow credit system.

In many national crises, black Americans have been essential workers – but serving in crucial roles has not resulted in economic equality.

"The difference between here and the South is just that — it's hidden."

More than 50 years after redlining was outlawed, the legacy of discrimination can still be seen in California’s poorest large city.

Who were Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the rest of the first 16 US presidents, what did they do, and what do they hope history has forgotten?

When public opinion favored sheltering youth from adult society, the Freeville Republic immersed them in carefully designed models of that society instead.

Before and during the Civil War, both enslavers and abolitionists used photography to garner support for their causes.

Biden will take over a country facing myriad challenges. And Trump's lame-duck period could be one of the most treacherous in American history.

American toilet-building and the continuities of colonial and postcolonial development.

How early blues musicians processed the toll taken by tornadoes, floods, and other disasters that displaced them from their communities.

What if there is a vaccine, but not everyone gets it? Exploring the lessons of the polio vaccine's shortcomings as we address a new public health crisis today.

An excerpt from the diary of presidential hopeful at the outset of the contested election of 1876.

The replacement of fountain pens was a stroke of design genius perfectly in time for the era of mass production.

The history of suffrage in the South—indeed, the nation—is messy and fraught, and more contentious than is typically remembered.

Lessons about “dark age cruelty” and the limits of reformism from 90 years ago.

The Trump administration reportedly could be taking us down a dangerous path.

How an Illuminati conspiracy theory captured American imaginations in the nation’s earliest days.

The Harrisons’ eco-art told stories about the apocalypse, pointing to a future where we’d all have to be survival artists

The hugely influential but largely forgotten labor leader Ben Fletcher couldn’t be more relevant to the most urgent political projects of today.

A new history charts the global legacy of Fordist mass production, tracing its appeal to political formations on both the left and the right.

In the 1950s, residents of Mosinee, Wisconsin, staged a coup to warn of the red menace. The lessons of that historical footnote have never been more relevant.

Ed Ayers visits with public historians in Texas and explores what's wrong with remembering the Alamo as the beginning of Texas history.

In the small town of Ocoee, Fla., a racist mob went on a rampage after a Black man tried to cast his ballot on Nov. 2, 1920.

Why his reformist retelling of the Chicago Seven fails to tell the real story of the leftists on trial.

On Cold War men's adventure magazines and the antifeminist tradition in American popular culture.

The history of tuning in to televised election returns.

A visit with artists and public historians in Chicago who are working to keep the memory of the city's "Red Summer" alive.

The ways that authorities in Richmond, Virginia, responded to the 1918 Flu offer a lens onto what – and who – was most valued by those in power there.

Ed Ayers visits Manzanar, the largest of the WWII-era internment camps for Japanese Americans, and speaks to those keeping the memories of detainees alive.

President Trump has called on supporters, including law enforcement officers, to monitor election sites. Voter intimidation tactics have a long history.

Explaining Joe Biden’s fondness for quoting Irish poets.

An overlooked corner of the Constitution hints at a right to be protected from infection.

Should art heal the centuries of racial violence and injustice in the US?

On Oct. 21, 1980, a beloved tradition was put to a stop.

With democracy hanging in the balance in 2020, the Court is clearly playing a decisive and destructive role. Unfortunately, we’ve been here before.

The collapse of the Republican Party.

Pursuing a Native alliance powerful enough to resist the American invaders, the Shawnee leader and his prophet brother envisioned a new and better Indian world.