Excerpts

A summary of how white migration out of the postbellum South entrenched Confederate culture across the U.S. during postwar reconciliation.

Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives.

The long history of sampling in music, and a new tool that lets artists sample without fear of copyright claims.

The ragtime composer's life, career, and resurrection.

The neglected history of Black mapmaking in America and the creative ways in which Black people have historically used mapping to tell stories.

Boston has more "made" land than any other American city.

How a 1960s interspecies communication experiment went haywire.

The untold story of the double agent who attacked the paper from within.

A look at racism in movie-making.

Building the Panama Canal.

In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments about the rule, but Congress originally intended to prioritize public health.

Before being pushed aside by the NCAA, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women governed women’s college athletics.

America’s favorite gun.

In the 1970s and early ’80s, NYC’s racially and ethnically diverse working-class neighborhoods nurtured groundbreaking rap, salsa, and punk music.

Again and again, a fervant British anticommunist's filmstrip of the novel shows images of women in states of distress.

The bicycle is a symbol of youth, but in the mid-twentieth century it also symbolized Black joy and mobility.

New laws regarding transgender youth are based on the assumption that the gender binary is natural.

After winning 6 percent of the vote in the 1912 presidential election, Eugene Debs ran afoul of the nation's new anti-sedition laws.

Aaron Bushnell and the age of immolation.

Remembering an exchange between George Washington and the poet Phillis Wheatley.

Like his predecessor, the president is decrying anti-Arab and Muslim hatred while helping fuel it. People are refusing to let him get away with this hypocrisy.

Loft life above the Fulton Fish Market and the day that everything changed.

The Black women and men who worked and slept in white homes are mostly invisible in the histories of suburbia.

Both Southerners. Both all but forgotten. Both, in their own ways, questioned the social constructions of race and white supremacy in their writings.

What should children learn in school? It's a question that's stirred debate for decades, and in 1974 it led to violent protests in West Virginia.

An 1848 investigative news story that relied on heavy data analysis snared big fish, including two future presidents.

A film produced by Western Electric, a haunting glimpse into the construction of the Twin Towers in New York and their early use.

Displaying the material history of the CIA.

The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 was one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history. It was also part of a larger pattern across the country.

Lepore’s framework insists that the “self-evident” truths of the nation’s founding were anything but.

One academic tells the story behind his new book -- and his next one.

While he did not die in a war, he can certainly be mourned as a casualty of war—as can the thousands of other veterans who have died by suicide.

Policies meant to whiten America almost always backfire.

On "Power and Liberty," a condensed version of Gordon Wood's entire sweep of scholarship about constitutionalism.

How a California homebuilder remade the Interior West.

According to Geoffrey Levin’s ‘Our Palestine Question,’ divides over Israeli policy aren’t new – they existed before American Jews fully embraced Zionism.

Proposition 6, better known as the Briggs Initiative, was the first attempt to restrict the rights of lesbian and gay Americans by popular referendum.

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.

The IBM 7094 anticipated the future of music—and also sounded like the Auto-Tuned pop stars of today.

A journey through the African American landscape.

How Charles Lamb and his collection of well-loved books inspired a generation of American collectors.

Was this Virginia? No one was quite sure.

Class conflict undermines assumptions about political solidarity.

In pre-Civil War Richmond, Black people were forced to literally pay for the mechanisms of white supremacy.

Long before 9/11, Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League lobbied for counterterror legislation that singled out Palestinians.

‘The Achilles Trap’ reexamines the relationship between Hussein and four U.S. administrations.

The former secretary of state is responsible for virtually every American geopolitical disaster of the past half-century.

In the 19th century ledger drawings became a concentrated point of resistance for Indigenous people, an expression of individual and communal pride.

Remembering the river helps me forget, at least for a moment, the challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy I experienced in my childhood.