Excerpts

Abolitionist and writer John Swanson Jacobs on reclaiming liberty in a land of unfreedom.

Descendants of the first settlers in Nicodemus are working to preserve and share a story of grit, perseverance, self-governance, and homecomings.

America's environmental movement has always been moralistic, which has made it bad at weighing tradeoffs. This accounts for its successes and also its failures.

Black women activism within documentary films in the 1960s United States.

As the legend of the singer–poet–sex symbol grows, fans rarely acknowledge his conservative streak.

"The Reckoning," Robin Blackburn’s monumental history, offers a dizzying account of the politics behind slavery's rise and fall.

A new book traces "the rise and fall of Pete Rose, and the last glory days of baseball."

We can thank the postal service for establishing the foundations of the American tradition of communications confidentiality.

Betty Ford and the public eye.

Large language models can do a lot of things. But can they write like an 18th-century fur trader?

When Thomas Kuhn coined the term, he wasn’t referring simply to “out of the box” thinking.

When I moved to Lower Manhattan in 1967, I decided to make a picture of every building in the neighbourhood before the city knocked it down.

Wilfred Reilly reviews two books critiquing modern ideas of race, social status, and diversity, advocating in favor of racial color-blindness.

Injecting the world’s deadliest toxin into one’s eye was always going to be a hard sell.

An overlooked history of selective policing at Columbia has undermined the safety of those within as well as beyond campus walls.

In 1924, sociologist and social reformer Caroline Bartlett Crane designed an award-winning tiny home in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

With the Dow sit-ins of the 1960s, students drew attention to links between the campus, war, and imperialism.

Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day.

What started as a solemn commemoration of dead Civil War soldiers has become a celebration of summer. Here's why that makes total sense.

Ed Dwight Jr. trained to go to the moon, but racism in the selection process kept him out of space.

How we rediscovered the tragedy in Mississippi that ushered us into the Great Migration.

The evolution of the right to privacy.

On the history of literature masquerading as primary source.

Whether you like Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert, Joe Rogan, or Sean Hannity, you're engaging the media world created by the late radio host.

How political figures have framed anti-LGBTQ bigotry as being pro-child and pro-parent.

The legendary actor left a mark in both film history and an industry fraught with self-regard.

A conversation with John David Waiheʻe III, former Governor of Hawai‘i, on the U.S. apology to the Hawaiian people.

The dumping of tons of tea in protest set the stage for the American Revolution and was a window on the culture and attitudes of the time.

The carcinogenic effects of asbestos have been known for decades. We should have banned it long ago.

On how the fringe ideas of a set of American neoliberals became a new and pervasive way of life.

Advertising went from being an embarrassing activity to a legitimate part of every company’s business plans—despite scant evidence that it worked.

Paul Cuffe was the first Black American to formally meet with a sitting president at the White House.

It wasn’t really Jews or Palestinians. It was the U.S. Congress, which closed American borders 100 years ago this month.

A century after three Tejano men were shot to death, the story their family tells is different than the official account. Whose story counts as Texas history?

“John Marshall...exhibited a subservience to the executive branch that continues to haunt us.”

The black naturalist, astronomer, surveyor, and almanac-writer Benjamin Banneker took issue with Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward “those of my complexion.”

And cost Gerald Ford the presidency.

A second-generation immigrant, Hazel Ying Lee was the first Chinese American woman to receive her pilot's license.

For more than a century, school nurses have improved public health in schools and beyond.

Executive power and the Constitution.

Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built.

When viewing federal authority as a bulwark for civil rights against local tyranny, we miss what the U.S. government has done to sustain white freedom.

The rhetorically modest but functionally powerful ruling that ended segregation shouldn’t be misused to forestall other efforts at racial equality.

They called themselves the Wide Awakes. They are a lesson in building a political movement.

Henry James, spiritualism, and the afterlife.

The legal academy has grown dismissive of Justice O’Connor, but the Supreme Court is not a law school faculty workshop. She saw herself as a problem-solver.

The evolution of women's sportswear.

From Dow to now.

Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.

Revisiting the AAUP's 1971 UCLA investigation.