Excerpts

Professional nurses who moved north during the Great Migration worked in New York City’s most contagious sanatorium — and changed the course of public health.

Sinclair Lewis and the small-town science of yearning.

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit.

100 years ago the U.S. tried to limit immigration to White Europeans. Instead, diversity triumphed.

In Beth Linker’s new book, she applies a disability studies lens to the history of posture.

Archaeologists help modern descendants of Chinese railroad workers in Utah commemorate their ancestors' labor and lives.

The story of an incident that may have been the first time the issue of race was ever addressed on a baseball field in the Carolinas.

On the continuing regime of racial terror in the post-Civil War American South.

They’re invested in legal education, creating an originalist industrial complex with outsize influence.

Spiritualists believed that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey and help those on Earth create a more just world.

On the hostess Langston Hughes called the “Joy Goddess of Harlem.”

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.

Reconsidering Earl Warren's place in U.S. history.

The newly empowered federal state created during Reconstruction could restrict immigration much more comprehensively than any state—as Chinese laborers soon discovered.

Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors.

Marty Peretz and the travails of American liberalism.

Meir Kahane's Legacy in Israel and America.

Why our understanding of the era has been hindered by the party system model.

A new career-spanning book offers a portrait of Painter’s career as a historian, essayist, and most recently visual artist.

Swarns’s book about a sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is the legacy of resistance.

The repressive machine currently arrayed against campus protests follows a familiar pattern.

In Indiana, “hoosier” is a badge of honor. In St Louis, it’s the nastiest insult around. The difference reveals the prejudice that breaks worker solidarity.

From 'The Tattooist of Auschwitz' to 'We Were the Lucky Ones,' a new wave of Holocaust dramas feel surprisingly shallow.

While some of the worst behavior has come from local and state police, university police have shown themselves to be just as capable of brutality.

Like student protesters today, Martin Luther King Jr. and other 1960s civil rights activists were criticized as disruptive and disorderly.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a school board in Virginia stripped the names of Confederate military figures from two schools.

The website version of an app designed to be a digital guide to the legacy of Till’s murder.

On revisiting the anti-imperialism of the 1960s and ’70s amid the return of left internationalism.

At the Habsburg Convention in Plano.

Pope Francis is the only world leader who seems prepared to denounce war.

A brief history of the textfile, and the production of conspiracy theories on the internet.

The response to college protests against the war on Gaza exemplifies the darkness of the Trumpocene.

The election will be a challenge for Joe Biden. But looking to the past won’t help him—or us—understand what lies ahead.

This oral history project records testimony from individuals who were active in the fight for racial equality in New Orleans between 1954 and 1976.

The politics of eccentric men in the early United States.

The university where 13 student protesters were killed or injured during the Vietnam War era worries that other schools have learned nothing from its history.

Today's pro-Palestinian activists are utilizing anti-apartheid tactics from thirty years ago.

On May 1, 1924, the first iodized salt appeared on shelves, quickly solving an iodine deficiency crisis that plagued the northern U.S. “goiter belt.”

At the height of circus animal acts in the late nineteenth century, animals who killed their captors might be publicly executed for their “crimes.”

Donald Trump says he will authorize a roundup of all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. A 1950s program with similar goals offers lessons.

A collection of records from the Nixon Presidential Library and other sources on the internal debates Nixon advisors were having about climate change and environment.

On Laura Helton’s “Scattered and Fugitive Things.”

As the 150th Kentucky Derby kicks off, the achievements of jockey Oliver Lewis and trainer Ansel Williamson at the first Derby have been largely forgotten.

For Ellen and William Craft, a flight from bondage required a daring masquerade, with exposure a constant risk.

A sweeping new history examines many untold stories of the American West in the late nineteenth century.

Americans have always borrowed, but how exactly did their lives become so entangled with the power of plastic cards?

In a new book, Robert KD Colby of the University of Mississippi shows how the Confederacy remained committed to slavery.

The struggles of a century ago show that historians need to keep explaining their work and role to the public.

Examining how William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass interpreted the nation's relationship with the Constitution.

Despite frequent litigation, U.S. courts have created a blurry line that puts administrators in an impossible situation.