Excerpts

Maria P. Williams pioneered filmmaking for African American women, but her life is even more thrilling than her sole film.

The real Andrew Johnson compared with the only film made about his life.

A rift in thinking about who should control powerful new technologies sent the brothers on diverging paths.

The history of grassroots banking politics has been overlooked — and even denied.

A documentary that follows the writer’s late-in-life journey to the South chronicles his vision for Black politics in a post–Civil Rights era world.

Who was buried in the lonely grave in New York’s potter’s field? The year-long search led to a lost world in the history of AIDS.

Congress’s periodic battles over the Farm Bill often pass unnoticed, but the document effectively determines what, how, and how much we eat.

Disappearing foods – and why they need protecting.

The turbulent history of an often forgotten moment that would leave blood in the streets and shape the modern landscape of Chicago.

Common in colonial New England, bundling allowed a suitor to spend a night in bed with his sweetheart—while her parents slept in the next room.

Matthew Lassiter’s history plays out in ranch houses, high school parking lots, and courtrooms from Shaker Heights to Westchester to Orange County.

While the concept stretches back centuries, it has garnered significant attention in recent decades.

The inventor of the atomic bomb, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s new film, was the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism.

A new television miniseries depicts the pursuit of Lincoln’s killer. But the public appetite for tales about the chase began even as it was happening.

Born into slavery, this preacher and Underground Railroad conductor served as the inspiration for a history-making book.

Right from the beginning, a commercial spirit and the wealth it generated were essential to creating and constituting America.

A look into neocolonialism in modern America.

But it didn’t work out for their parties.

Fifty-five years ago, a congressman made a single addition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that changed everything.

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.

New information on Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man who would turn escape into an art form.

A project to bring to light the stories of these victims’ lives and to highlight the patterns of racial terror perpetrated across the Northeast and Midwest.

From civil rights marches to moonwalks, historical imagery that belongs to everyone is locked away behind paywalls. Why?

A historian attends the 250th anniversary of the Tea Party, and reflects on the ways Americans remember one of the Revolution's main set pieces.

Denied burial alongside Union soldiers killed during the Battle of Gettysburg, the 30 or so men were instead buried in the all-Black Lincoln Cemetery.

Born out of the Great Depression, the genre reminds us that even in hard times there's laughter, love, and light.

Was he a brilliant painter or a brilliant brand?

Textbook watchdogs Mel and Norma Gabler are good, sincere, dedicated people, who just may be destroying your child’s education.

America has rarely treated all people with HIV equally.

Clouds and conspiracies.

Attribution can make visible the vast infrastructure of research and display how much hard-won knowledge, including creative endeavor, it has faciliated.

A civil rights initiative during World War II known as the Double V campaign advocated for dual victories: over fascism abroad, and racial injustice in the U.S.

What does Hermann’s watchful position over New Ulm—stolen Dakota homelands— reveal about settler colonialism and the geography of memory?

It has been an article of faith that Jews and Black Americans have a natural bond, but a ‘Black-Jewish alliance’ is not, or at least not reliably, a thing.

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

As more Black men gained the right to vote in New York, the state began to change its laws to reduce their power or disenfranchise them completely.

Mario Van Peebles' "Outlaw Posse" is the latest attempt to correct the erasure of people of color from the classic cinema genre.

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.

It is worth taking a moment to recover the genealogy for the "crosshairs," the universal modern index of imminent violent killing.

The rich history of Japanese-language literature challenges assumptions about what counts as U.S. art.

Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the vote has a familiar ring. It evokes an egregious example of election fraud in the 1890s.

City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.

Beginning in 1905, one star-studded song-publishing company would push the aesthetic limits of how Black popular music was shown to the public.

Space and place in New York City's responses to the French Revolution.

Until the Civil War, regulating immigration to the US was left to individual states. That changed with Emancipation and the legal end of slavery.

A review of three new studies about how race and class intersect.

The venerable movie studio once defined the industry's zeal for consolidation, pioneering vertical integration and serving as the model for its major rivals.

Over a weekend in 1995, a small group gathered in Ohio to unleash the power of the internet by making it navigable.

Steven Spielberg’s early films conjure all of his moviemaking magic to repair a world of lost dads.

A measure almost made the Republican Party’s 2024 Texas primary ballot to measure whether party members would support secession from the United States.