Excerpts

The ongoing UAW strike is reminiscent of early UAW leader Walter Reuther — before the union and Reuther himself downsized their ambitions.

Amid Reagan’s late-sixties crackdown on the California counterculture, a jury was tasked with deciding whether Lenore Kandel’s psychedelic sex poems had “redeeming social importance.”

From the outset of the American Revolution, a lingering problem that plagued the minds of the Continental Congress dealt with its financing.

A new biography of Edith Hamilton tells the story of how and why ancient literature became widely read in the United States.

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

True Crime is having a renaissance with popular TV series and podcasts. But the history of the genre dates back much further.

From homesteaders to tourists to the U.S. Army, railroads flooded the Great Plains with people who saw bison as pests, amusements, or opportunities for profit.

Who owns the past? That is the subject of debate after the discovery of a human skeleton on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington.

The great short story writer and poet wrote many a book review.

How Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's activism set the stage for Lebron James and twenty-first century Black professional athletes.

Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose is the latest example of the struggles around Jewish representation on the stage and screen.

A former park ranger is on the hunt to complete a collection of posters by artists commissioned by the government celebrating national parks.

How English words evolved on a foreign continent.

How American Indians in Hollywood have gone from stereotypes to starring roles.

Life as a Signal Corps weatherman was dangerous: besides inclement weather, they faced labor riots, conflicts with Native Americans, yellow fever outbreaks, fires, and more.

The history and legacy of a beautiful project to record thousands of new fruit varieties.

A new biography of the Velvet Underground founder, Lou Reed, considers the stark duality of the man and his music.

‘Time Warp’ all the way back to the 1800s.

There's no clear system in place to repatriate remains of captive Africans or objects associated with them.

New dating methods have added more evidence that these fossils date to 23,000 years ago, pushing back migration to the Americas by thousands of years.

Canada's politicians accidentally honored a Nazi immigrant. The U.S. has frequently done the same.

A feminist perspective on the first and only female prime minister of Israel.

Literature is key to a healthy democracy, but schools are leaving books behind.

The archives of the historically Black Tuskegee University recently released recordings from 1957 to 1971, with a number by powerful civil rights leaders.

It was a year that showcased the audacious talent in Hollywood experimenting with darker themes and new film techniques.

The Spiro Agnew Edition.

Kevin Phillips help set the Republican Party on the path that led it to Trump.

The long, strange, history of the baseball cap.

The comparison between last weekend's Hamas attack and 9/11 is apt.

W.E.B. Du Bois’ message to African American artists.

Early 20th century National Park Service Rangers were a notoriously rough-and-tumble lot.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Siege of Wounded Knee, the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee by American Indian Movement (AIM) activists.

A small band of Modoc warriors held off hundreds of U.S. soldiers in California. Ultimately, the conflict left the Modoc leaders dead and the tribe divided.

As world leaders scramble to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from escalating, it is often forgotten just how close the Yom Kippur War came to all-out nuclear war.

On Oct. 11, 1988, at the height of the AIDS crisis and a wave of homophobia, people were asked to take a daring step by declaring publicly that they were gay.

On the drive-in movie culture that captured a yearning for fast cars on dusty roads.

How Eugene V. Debs turned American republicanism against the chiefs of capitalism – and became a true crusader for freedom.

More than an artful calligrapher, John Hancock forswore the austerity of his fellow Bostonians, and their extremism.

“You know how many second basemen or shortstops I knocked on their ass in my career?”

15th century dogma connects the genocide and land dispossession of Native Americans with the enslavement and oppression of African Americans throughout history.

50 years after native inhabitants of the Chagos Islands were forced out to make room for a military base, a Chagossian leader came to D.C. seeking reparations.

Coke knew their plastic would trash the planet…and did it anyway.

RJ Smith’s biography of Chuck Berry examines his subject’s instinct for crossing the line musically, racially, and morally.

Suspected of orchestrating the Lincoln assassination, the South’s most prominent Jew escaped to London to start a new life as a high-powered lawyer.

The self-confidence that kept Columbus going was his undoing.

A new book links the rise of American prisons to the expansion of American power around the globe.

Over a century after one of New York City’s deadliest industrial accidents, the names of its victims, most of them women, are being enshrined in steel.

Alexander Hamilton always believed that the providential protection that kept the small Jewish world alive would embrace his own extraordinary nation.

One La Jolla family’s story illuminates a persistent gap in our collective memory.

Before Salem, this small town succumbed to the witch-hunting fever.