Excerpts

As a versatile but complex hero, King led a life open to interpretation by politicians and activists of all types who fiercely debated his legacy.

Exploring Deaf history, language and education as the hearing child of a Deaf adult.

Until both American and Mexican police forces stop treating it like a war, the violence of drug prohibition won't stop.

Farmworker housing cooperatives in Ventura County, California.

“Conventional wisdom tells us that the gold rush was a male undertaking,” writes the historian Glenda Riley. But women were there, too.

How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy.

A Civil War veteran, John William Boucher was one of the oldest men on the ground during the Great War.

On the early origins of a very American kind of writing.

Because of the growth of the Prohibition state, police abuse fomented considerable discussions among police and lawyer associations, criminologists, and others.

The slow unraveling of a nation’s suburbs.

Four important court cases that have defined the landscape of women’s rights in the United States.

As early at 1955, government reports indicated that DC’s emerging drug problem represented “a serious and tragic and expensive and ominous” development.

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.

Rewriting the history and future of an iconic suburb.

We cannot understand the last fifty years of U.S. history—certainly not the first thing about Black history—without studying the emergence and evolution of rap.

David Beito has penned one of the most damning scholarly histories of FDR to date.

An Alabama man faces execution by nitrogen gas—the first U.S. execution by gas in a quarter-century, 100 years after the practice began.

Long before the Sacklers appeared on the scene, families like the Astors and the Delanos cemented their upper-crust status through the global trade in opium.

How The Go-Go’s emerged from the LA punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album.

Barbecue is a cornerstone of American cuisine, containing all of the contradictions of the country itself.

Well before the hippies arrived, LSD and other hallucinogens were poised to enter the American mainstream.

In the 1950s the construction of a dam on the Texas–Mexico border displaced communities from their land—and anticipated the wall-building underway today.

100 years ago, Chief Justice William Howard Taft made the Court more efficient and more powerful, marking a turning point whose effects are still being felt.

On Samuel Moyn's Cold War liberalism.

The special relationship between the United States and Israel was cemented by the support offered by Lyndon B. Johnson throughout the sixties.

What happened to the Bailey family in the Detroit suburb of Warren became a flashpoint in the national battle over integration.

How the Southern Strategy of the late 20th century gave rise to the modern GOP.

Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident. But writing by hand did not simply continue to “advance” until it inevitably began to erode.

On how Europe’s interwar period informs the present.

“It was made under the worst of conditions,” the filmmaker reveals in a new book. “People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle.”

Politicians from both sides used to agree on immigration policy. What happened?

Researchers studying the 160-year-old fur of a dog named Mutton found that the breed existed for at least 5,000 years before European colonizers eradicated it.

A new biography examines the enigma of the musician.

The 20th century brought dinner parties to the masses, along with some truly unhinged entertaining advice.

As director of the FBI for decades, J. Edgar Hoover helped build a massive, professionalized national security state and hounded leftists out of public life.

Powered by compressed air, the system transported millions of letters between 1897 and 1953.

George Washington's fraught relationship with Native Americans.

A new book shows that Uber was a symbol of a neoliberal philosophy that neglected public funding and regulation in favor of rule by private corporations.

Mars fantasists still cling to dreams of the Old West.

When speech offends, who decides where boundaries should be drawn?

The exhibition “Mermaids and Monsters” explores hoaxes of yore.

How decades-old decisions to build two California prisons in a dry lakebed and a chaotic climate left 8,000 incarcerated people at risk.

In March 1911, the segregated Crownsville asylum opened outside Baltimore, Maryland, admitting only Black patients.

Republicans may claim otherwise, but the civil rights hero was no color-blind conservative.

Americans have been isolated at the U.N. on Israel for a half century — but that used to prompt fierce debate.

Lost cause narratives sometimes have been powerful enough to build or destroy political regimes. They can advance a politics of grievance.

In the 19th century, civil wars tore apart the US, Mexico and Argentina. Then came democracy’s fight against reaction.

Prohibition—and its newly created underground economy—changed the way women lived, worked, and socialized.

A reminder of how tricky it is to balance protecting transparency and freedom of association.

Alicia Puglionesi explores the damage white supremacy did to Native Americans and their land.