Excerpts

How one activist helped turn evangelical women into the backbone of right-wing conservatism.

A conversation with the legal scholar on why it is unusual that the Constitution is core to American national identity.

Recovering a life in fragments, Arthur Bowler in slavery and freedom.

“The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports” upends long-held assumptions about trans people’s participation in sports.

First exhibited in 1878, Charles F. Ritchel's dirigible was about as wacky, dangerous and impractical as any airship ever launched.

Public schools are crucial infrastructures of the reproduction of social inequality and the US carceral state.

On the porous, ever-shifting boundaries between science and speculation.

Power and choice in the 1930s novel.

Corporations sold Americans on the chasing arrows — while stripping the logo of its worth.

We compiled Reconstruction-era documents to identify 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans given land—only to have it returned to their enslavers.

Yuval Levin urges us to take America’s greatest constitutional thinker, James Madison, as our lodestar.

On (not) voting.

The Insurrection Act is a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States code, giving presidents unimaginable emergency power. No President has abused it. Yet.

Human bondage was big business in the antebellum US, and men weren’t the only ones cashing in.

In throwing up new roadblocks to the use of private money to redress racial and economic inequality, the Fearless Fund ruling is antihistorical.

During Japanese-American incarceration, what happened to mixed-race families and individuals?

As Cornel West is receiving ballot access help from Republicans, 20 years ago Al Sharpton’s campaign for president was largely orchestrated by Roger Stone.

Monopolies across the grocery supply chain squeeze consumers and small-business owners alike. Big Data will only entrench those dynamics further.

By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Blair LM Kelley’s book, "Black Folk," helps tell the larger story of American democracy.

Its agents are often depicted as malevolent puppet masters—or as bumbling idiots. The truth is even less comforting.

For more than two decades, a community of committed internet users has been chewing over the famous Londoner’s diary.

Éamon de Valera was accused of attempting an armed uprising against the government. Then he made a daring jailbreak, and later became president of Ireland.

She remade the American songbook in her image, uprooting the very meaning of musical performance.

Black citizens fought for justice and were met with violence. They persevered.

Historian Manisha Sinha argues that the Second Republic lasted decades longer than most histories state and achieved wider gains.

Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of civilians killed by a carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose.

One of the best-known icons of modern society is a classic example of a symbol—it’s easy to spot, but hard to explain. Who came up with it?

When labor found a common cause — and enemy — with the abolition movement.

What we can learn from the history of maritime folk music.

Successes that came when presidents protected student protesters from outside meddling are worth remembering when students return to campus.

Country music boosters rebranded the genre and tied it to America's military mission as a way to build popularity.

The gunslingers, innovators, and explorers who carved their destinies from the sprawling promise of the West.

For the entire 20th century, it had felt like telepathy was just around the corner. Why is that especially true now?

The melee, the mayhem, the metal chairs.

How history shaped the modern U.S. Border Patrol agent.

Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” is one of several recent hits bringing back the genre that never got a name.

On the construction of America's new capital city.

Compared to their 1960s forerunners, today’s young radicals seem far less interested in moving towards responsible adulthood.

Transgender people's reactions to watching oral histories of the legacy of a 1966 riot in the Tenderloin that was nearly lost to history.

A new exhibition seeks to understand the young soldiers who came ashore at Normandy.

Why introductory economics courses continued to teach zombie ideas from before economics became an empirical discipline.

Tracing the family history of some of today's most popular celebrities.

The many strategies foreign governments have used to shape American policy in their favor.

No, really.

What happened in 1970 after Richard Nixon was told, “I doubt that there would be any problem of student demonstrations in Tennessee.”

Detaining migrants is pointless. American history proves it.

The medical profession saw nothing wrong with offering a cocaine-laced cola to white, middle-class consumers. Selling it to Black Americans was another matter.

In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life.

On Ana Raquel Minian’s “In the Shadow of Liberty.”

We owe at least part of the 2008 financial crisis to Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism.