Excerpts

As he told a friend years later, "the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips."

A Californian politician's disastrous expedition to seize Mexican land, and how newspapers spun the story.

These images of the LA Alligator Farm depict a level of casual proximity unthinkable today.

In its 90th year, the radical peace movement is reinvigorating itself by going hyper-local.

His research ushered in the psychedelic renaissance. Now it's changing how he's facing death.

How San Francisco's Chinatown community used infrastructure as a conduit for identity, empowerment, and resilience.

Zine-making is a tradition shared by the young and alienated, people enamored with the fringes of culture. Can a museum exhibit capture its essence?

Southern Baptists were seeking a religion of the heart, and in Edwards they discovered a trove of treatises, biographies, and sermons on Christian spirituality.

Breaking down the myths of originalism and America's founding.

The old Midwest was a place animated by the belief that a self-governing republic is the best regime for man.

A visual journalist remembers a time when "housing was more flexible, fluid and communal than it is today.”

The long history of benevolence, self-help, and parades in New Orleans.

A look at "Biography Of A Phantom", Robert McCormick's book about blues legend Robert Johnson.

The recent history of copyright in music cannot be separated from the rise of technologies for the recording and transmission of content online.

A conversation with Erika Marie Bsumek about one of the worst boondoggles in the Southwest.

Feminist. Preacher. Abolitionist. Civil rights pioneer. Now the full story of the American icon's life and faith is finally coming to light.

Three years later, amid another national election, the American public is still slow to understand the enormity of January 6, 2021.

Tracking the history of a curious scientific term.

Neither side of the border has seen the benefits it was promised.

A detailed look on Abraham Lincoln's political philosophy on slavery, ownership, and freedom.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the beloved children’s television show was shaped by the African-American communities in Harlem and beyond.

The culture of calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood.

When we think of Jonathan Edwards, most probably think first of him as a theologian or preacher. But a new book also shows him as a mentor.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, Geronimo, Robert Oppenheimer, Steven Spielberg, and the mysteries of New Mexico's desert.

A document in her papers in the Library of Congress sheds new light on postwar research on psychedelics.

On April 5, 1910, the world was stunned by socialists’ victory at the ballot box in Milwaukee.

We still live with the consequences of the 28th president’s fuzzy thinking.

Harry Emerson Fosdick's ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’

To understand the proslavery defense of the 1850s, one must reckon with the proslavery Malthusianism articulated by Cooper in the 1820s.

James Forten was one of Philadelphia’s most distinguished and important citizens.

Steps from Georgetown, a memorial to Teddy Roosevelt stands amid ghosts of previous inhabitants: the Nacotchtank, colonist enslavers, and the emancipated.

In one of the most unique cases in the history of race riots, the African American businessperson sued his birthplace of Onancock, Virginia, in September 1910.

America's obsession with football is nearly as old as the game itself.

Baptists were never monolithic on the issue of slavery, but Southern Baptists were united in their opposition to Northern Baptists determining their beliefs.

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.

Or, why families under siege make for great movies.

The resistance and unionism of enslaved and freed Black women in the midst of the Confederacy is an epic story of sacrifice for nation and citizenship.

Ideas dating back to slavery have minimized opportunities for Black quarterbacks in the NFL.

A Barthesian bristle and the curious power of Walt Whitman’s posthumous eyelids.

A front-row seat to a slow-moving catastrophe. How tech both helps and hurts our world.

No, castoreum is not a cheap substitute for strawberries; it’s luxe, artisanal secretions from a beaver's rear end.

What the debate about the Arctic Refuge tells us about science denialism.

Belknap’s downfall was his decision to abuse his authority to appoint “sutlers” or civilian merchants who ran trading posts that served military outposts.

A Hungarian immigrant first brought the soccer style field kick to the NFL.

San Francisco 49ers fans may feel like their team name is less racist than the “Chiefs,” but given the history of the Gold Rush, they shouldn’t be so smug.

NIMBYs were citizen activists who set a model for participatory democracy that YIMBYs should follow.

Kate Mullany's former home in Troy, New York honors one of the earliest women's labor unions that sought fair pay and safe working conditions.

Journalist Rachel Nolan investigates tens of thousands of forced adoptions and the U.S. policy that enabled them.

US intelligence agencies seem to have adopted Orwell’s idea of doublethink—“to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.”

A literary examination of Henry David Thoreau's life and legacy today.