Excerpts

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

The story of Mabel Ping‑Hua Lee.

How white-dominated racial power produces inter-ethnic group conflict.

“A camping area is a form, however primitive, of a city” —Constant Nieuwenhuys

Why do we eat pumpkin pie spice in the fall?

Reflections on Pavement, Nirvana, the very meaning of history, and the end of neoliberalism.

Since 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine was first introduced to the world, the US has regarded Cuba as key to its designs for Latin America.

And why won't all the worst people stop talking about it?

The author of the 20th century’s most influential history book anticipates the coming world order.

Medical debt has always been part of the history of nonprofit hospitals.

The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the U.S. in WWII was matched only by the ambivalence the U.S. showed toward principles on which WWII was fought.

The history of Head Start shows that child poverty is a choice.

In the past and present, librarians have fought book bans and censorship.

Female ghosts seem to dominate the afterlife. Whether the spirits are real or not, the reasons for the disparity could be revealing.

The birth, death and afterlife of our romance with tobacco.

John Kelly's statement about the Civil War is not surprising, but they are a reminder that we should still be worrying about the Civil War.

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.

Koch poured $2 million into an embryonic Libertarian Party to buoy his run for vice president. He knew he wouldn't win—but that wasn't the point.

In the South, the pairing was once as popular as PB&J.

The rifle is a consumer product to which advertisers successfully attached an identity—one that has translated to a particularly intractable politics.

In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the document has doomed our politics. But it can also save them.

This is the first post in our theme for October 2023, Urban Disability focusing on the role of cities in fostering disability rights.

The new album “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning” collects gospel songs recorded inside a notorious penitentiary.

On upending the accepted narrative of the movement.

A 1953 C.I.A.-backed coup that ousted Iran’s Cold War leader has colored U.S.-Iran relations for decades.

Chris Waltz was appalled. He felt Democrats were using the Sandy Hook tragedy to tell him he wasn’t responsible enough to own an AR-15.

The most hypnotic piece of music released so far in 2023 was recorded forty-seven years ago in a barely adequate studio in Rockland County, New York.

On factional strife in the Early Republic, and why parties themselves were universally despised.

The first of these festivals debuted in the early 1960s, serving as a prime example of the United States' burgeoning counterculture.

The Puritans outlawed Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan" because it was critical of the society they were building in colonial New England.

Edgar Allan Poe knew that readers would add their visual image of the author to his work to create a personality that informed their reading.

One of the thousands of white Southerners who supported the Union during the Civil War and a rare example of a slave owner who changed his views on race.

The only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.

The famous disaster razed a metropolis and spread a pack of colorful lies. To sift through the ashes today is to encounter some uncomfortable truths.

And the ways capital took advantage of the state's policing of sexuality.

The program was about education. But it was also about surveillance.

How American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.

Two new books model radically different ways of studying the past.

Requiring rest, rather than work, is still a radical idea.

A new book exposes effects of anti-Black myth-making and calls for an end to the family policing system.

Pence invoked them at the Republican debates, but a true reckoning with their history provides a different vision of the nation’s future.

A left that is ambivalent about liberalism can still seek to engage it.

To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

Chile’s president was in Washington over the weekend to mark a grim anniversary. Congress is still asking questions about the U.S. role in the 1973 coup.

The neoliberal order has been exposed as fraudulent, inefficient, and inequitable. Yet it hardly lies in the dustbin of history.

Reconstruction-era opponents of racial equality popularized the charge that protecting civil rights would amount to the end of capitalism.

The story of the man who introduced ice cubes into our beverages.

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

A new book illuminates how Black Americans used property ownership, common law and other methods to assert their rights.

Decisions made now could shape the next 100 years.