Excerpts

A gathering of Union veterans in 1883 sheds light on the country's vision of the American West—as a space for reconciliation and a prize won by the war.

Today’s Trumpist radicals are not (small-c) conservatives – but they stand in the continuity of Modern Conservatism’s defining political project.

Mahmoud Khalil’s case is eerily similar to that of the L.A. Eight when students were targeted not because of any criminal activity but because of their speech.

The books examine the history of space exploration, from the race to discover Pluto to the idea of space colonization.

As Arkansas politics becomes more conservative, voters are using the ballot for progressive ends.

How a small factory off the coast of North Carolina played a role in the war.

In the Tidewater region of Virginia, history is slipping beneath the waves. In the Anthropocene, a complicated past is vanishing.

After February 28, 1967, the main reason to go was to get a job.

Changes to US immigration rules have largely closed the door to new entries, leading inexorably to a “graying” of Irish America.

Sometimes seen as the stuff of commencement addresses, his poems are hard to pin down—just like the man behind them.

A new biography tells a far more complex, nuanced, and, frankly, interesting historical episode than that depicted in the typical grade-school pageant.

The 'human rights president' had some tough political decisions to make regarding Augusto Pinochet in 1979.

How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war.

The solidarity group Noraid raised millions of dollars to support the Irish republican movement during the Troubles.

On the scholarship and intellectual legacies of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, William Dunning and other academics.

The Great Hunger was a modern event, shaped by the belief that the poor are the authors of their own misery and that the market must be obeyed at all costs.

Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.

It’s only a century since US diplomats first persuaded the world that it’s wrong for countries to annex their neighbours.

Even as “Edges of Ailey” gathers such intimate documents, it does not make them legible to its visitors.

The same Christian ideology that inspired J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to surveil MLK is alive and well in the Trump administration.

In 1978, Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act. It gave rise to some truly miserable air travel—and neoliberalism.

Trump’s clumsy partisan takeover of the National Archives and Records Administration recalls two consequential and troubling episodes from its history.

DOGE's seizure of government databases is not just an act of bureaucratic reorganization. It is an act of constitutional restructuring.

As a boy, David Edmonston was the source of today’s measles vaccine. Now he regrets vaccine doubts.

The first businessman president realized that working with Congress – not alone or against it – was the best way to create an efficient federal government.

If you think mass protests can’t combat evil, remember what we did in the 1980s.

A new publication obscures the canonical writer.

The Kony 2012 campaign pioneered a new form of online activism — one that served empire more than the people it claimed to help.

That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

We risk losing not just the images but also our ability to bear witness to history itself.

Much of the rhetoric surrounding immigration debates is steeped in the language of Revelation, argues New Testament professor Yii-Jan Lin.

Diplomatic relations, domestic repression. Plus: the truth about Joseph Welch, and a bit of family history.

The United States Postal Service is under federal scrutiny. It’s not the first time.

Who decides how history gets written?

Today’s attacks are just the latest form of backlash to the New Deal.

Floyd’s unusual visibility gives rare insight into how the largely-invisible dragomen shaped travelers’ understandings of the Bible and the Holy Land.

On the tension between celebratory rhetoric and restrictive policy surrounding immigration.

Bethlehem Steel was the birthplace of skyscrapers, bridges, and battleships. What happened after the plant's furnaces went cold?

President Trump’s criticisms of government workers have something in common with Joe McCarthy’s.

The story Frances Perkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Labor Secretary, highlights the importance of protecting due process.

The early 1920s in the US offers historical lessons on how current pessimism about the state of the country can manifest in dangerous, discriminatory ways.

A previous, dark period of American history paired ethnic exclusion through mass deportations and ideological exclusion through political repression.

At its height, the political crackdown felt terrifying and all-encompassing. What can we learn from how the movement unfolded—and from how it came to an end?

The missing Black history of upstate New York challenges the delusion of New York as a land of freedom far removed from the American original sin of slavery.

How the American legal system created an economic environment that subordinated the entire world to domestic business interests.

Tales of the city and beyond.

The long battle against Title IX.

Jimmy Carter is known for his defense of human rights worldwide. But in 1979, he threatened to deport thousands of Iranian student protesters.

It is not attempting to tell a story about Native erasure. It is not trying to tell a story about Native Americans at all. And that tells the real story.

On the first Monday in March, Pulaski Day festivities at Chicago’s Polish Museum of America honored the “Father of American Cavalry,” 280 years after his birth.