Excerpts

The nation's historical markers delight, distort and, sometimes, just get the story wrong.

Historians are working to shine a light on Alice Ball’s legacy and contributions to an early treatment of a dangerous and stigmatizing disease.

Connie B. Gay and the roots of country music militarization.

Oil’s rise was as dependent on the old as much as the new. The industry also benefited from changes in agriculture.

Why should taxpayers fund schools that violate their own values, the Moms for Liberty wonder? A new book traces how this kind of thinking about public spending came to be.

"I was always working on a theory of America."

A conversation with the activists and writers about their wide-ranging history of the politics of the common good and togetherness.

Neighborhoods that once promised prosperity now offer crumbling infrastructure, aged housing stock, and social animus.

By looking at the labor history of academia, you can see the roots of a crisis in higher education that has been decades in the making.

Character codes have been evolving through multiple systems over multiple centuries, this is the story.

On the Oneida Community, a radical religious organization practicing “Bible communism,” and eventually, manufacturing silverware.

Political funerals and the tour of Henry Clay's corpse.

The African American perfectionists offered “faith” instead of “hope”—emphasizing the struggle to realize a vision of justice.

A path to freedom for enslaved blacks, an engine of economic independence, a treat for Mardi Gras revelers.

Private coalitions alone aren’t enough to address racial wealth gaps.

On the falsification of Lincoln Center’s history.

The groundbreaking musician who inspired Elvis and The Beatles.

Some accounts suggest that the Passover Parade was even more glamorous than its famous counterpart, the Easter Parade.

A quarter century on, the school shooters’ mythology has propagated a sprawling subculture that idolizes murder and mayhem.

There is a long list of ways America was transformed by the terrorist attacks. But the question of how TV itself was changed is more complicated.

A look at the American public's ambivalent opinion of the death penalty.

Religious scholars argue that the Waco raid was not justified and that with more understanding of theology, the loss of life could have been avoided.

The disparate and intriguing connections found in environmental history, one tree ring at a time.

No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation.

For half a century, viewers scorned the laugh track while adoring shows that used it. Now it has all but disappeared.

Funny, convivial, chatty—a new edition of Emily Dickinson's letters upends the myth of her reclusive genius. 

DARE lost its once hegemonic influence over drug education, but it had long-lasting effects on American policing, politics, and culture.

Marbled paper was a way to make banknotes and checks unique—a critical characteristic for a nascent American Republic.

Between the 1920s and 1940s, wealthy young women signed up to run errands and carry messages for the Frontier Nursing Service.

The bipartisan push to create AmeriCorps, and the community service organization's impact.

How lesbian teenagers forged community bonds and found connection through magazines.

Land acknowledgments amount to the hollow incantations of hollow people.

You can thank Eric Voegelin for the right’s clichéd catchall critique for the left.

Film and television writers face an existential threat.

Rat bones collected from centuries-old shipwrecks tell a story of ecological competition and swift victory.

A reconsideration of Robert Frost at 150.

The Postal Savings System offered depositors a US government-backed guarantee of security, but it was undone by for-profit private banks.

A new PBS documentary whitewashes the conservative founder of National Review.

Despite assumptions about its demise, it is still enmeshed in the foundations of how some professions think about the world.

It’s a great time to be in a union—but a terrible time to try to start a new one.

The women who opposed their own enfranchisement in the Victorian era have little in common with the “Repeal the 19th” fringe of today.

The star of the 1920s silver screen who appears on Taylor Swift’s new album abruptly left Hollywood at the height of her success.

Activists around the country are debating the best ways to acknowledge lynchings. But they often meet resistance from local residents — both Black and White.

On Cormac McCarthy.

Minstrel shows were an American invention, but they also found success in the United Kingdom, where audiences were negotiating their relationships with empire.

For more than 50 years, we've been worrying about "grade inflation" at elite American universities. It's time to move on.

The prominence of politicos-turned-pundits is a product of cable news' turn to opinion commentary as a cheap and easy way to meet the needs of 24/7 coverage.

Syncopation and swing reigned supreme at the annual Lorton Reformatory Jazz Festival in the 1960s.

The people of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, helped keep the Greenbrier resort's bunker—designed to hold the entirety of Congress—hidden for 30 years.

A brief history of the license plate.