Excerpts

Even popular cookies can end up permanently cut from the roster.

A new history of labor organizing in Coachella tells us the story of the United Farm Workers and how its rank-and-file members drove the union to success.

An intellectual history of inequality in economic theory reveals the ideological reasons behind the field’s resurgence in the last few decades.

In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly reinvented themselves.

He moved to California during the Nazi era, and his music—which ranged from the lushly melodic to the rigorously atonal—caught the ears of everyone.

Native son Jonah Walters finds something entirely too innocent about the tales told about the anthracite industry’s origins.

The SS Eastland disaster and Chicago's ghosts.

Galvanized by an act of racial violence, the band A Grain of Sand brought a new version of Asian American activism and identity to the folk music scene.

For some, it is a luscious dessert, a delightful treasure hiding in the woods. For others, it is, to say the least, an acquired taste. It is an enigma.

In 1976, Ronald Reagan found owning the soul of a party isn’t the same as taking home its nomination.

For what did these Americans endure such painful hardship and sacrifice? For what were they taking such a significant stand? Surely, it wasn’t just about tea!

This is the story of Giovanni da Verrazzano, who never reached Asia, but became the first European to set foot on the site of the future city of New York.

Christian moralists long promoted hobbies as a way to occupy idle hands, bringing the work ethic into free time. Today hobbies risk turning into side hustles.

A groundbreaking new book demonstrates that even during the days of slavery, African Americans knew a lot more about legal principles than has been imagined.

U.S.-funded social networks were launched in 2010 with ZunZuneo and Piramideo in 2013.

John A. Williams’s unsung novel.

Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’s classic 'Huckleberry Finn' into a tragedy.

From a 1915 suffragist road trip to the “First Lady of Drag Racing.”

The defining of corporations as legal “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment rights got a leg up from the fight over a California anti-Chinese immigrant law.

For as long as Americans have been subjected to lousy candidates, they’ve been told to suck it up and vote for one of them.

The UN’s failure to dismantle the colonial order foreclosed the application of the Genocide Convention to Israel, South Africa, and the United States.

Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.

Donald Trump’s candidacy wasn’t the first time the Republican Party was split by an outsider declaring war on the establishment elite.

Hurricane Katrina exposed deep inequities in federal disaster response. "We never felt so cut off in all our lives."

Best remembered as the partner of Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy, Evelyn Trent was an anti-colonial feminist who helped initiate India’s communist movement.

An entire industry wouldn't exist without him, yet few know his name. In his songs, Knott challenged the faithful to examine their faults and hypocrisies.

In 1974, after years of grinding war in Vietnam had exhausted most of the antiwar movement, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda came up with a new strategy.

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.

As a feminist in the adult-film industry, she believed the answer wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.

A radical third party had a new idea for selecting a presidential candidate, and it’s still in use today.

Hushpuppies are delicious, iconically Southern, and no one seems to have a clue where they came from.

On the suppression of sign language.

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction.

A new biography reveals how Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Americans a vocabulary to understand themselves in an era even more tempestuous than our own.

On the Irish writer’s grand tour of the Gilded Age United States.

Kevin Cook and Jeff Guinn on David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and the 1993 siege of Waco.

Romano’s book is a vital, comprehensive piece of media scholarship about one of the most influential outlets of the last century. It’s also fun as hell to read.

Organizing is a kind of alchemy: it turns alienation into connection, despair into dedication, and oppression into strength.

A UC Berkeley student’s award-winning research shines a light on LGBTQ+ life in Japanese American concentration camps during World War II.

A cartoon report on the only policy proven to address the housing shortage and how racism, inept management, and disinvestment led to long-term decline.

136 books that made America think.

Age of Revolutions was happy to interview Nathan Perl-Rosenthal about his new book, entitled 'The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It.'

A new series dramatizes Edwin Stanton's hunt for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators in the aftermath of the president’s 1865 assassination.

An effort is underway to restore President Wilson’s reputation as a great reformer. His best reforms were won by a mass movement, often pushing against Wilson.

Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.

The Duke Center for Firearms Law's efforts to catalog the history of gun laws.

Putting massive amounts of time in perspective is incredibly hard for humans, so we made this graphic.

The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.

The Kerner Commission was credited with exposing systemic racism that inspired resistance in Black communities. James Baldwin argued that it stated the obvious.

The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time.