Excerpts

George Eliot refused to stereotype the rural working class. Her outlook would serve us well today.

MLB’s focus on wealthier fans stands in stark contrast to rhetoric about the ballpark that had long called it a site of egalitarian intermixing.

Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, about 300,000 Chinese gained admission to the U.S. between 1882 and 1943. How did they do it?

For residents, organizers, and onlookers, neighborhoods can be a window for witnessing and making sense of history.

"Henry Fonda for President" more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary.

They say there’s never been a man like Donald Trump in American politics. But there was—and we should learn from him. Look back to early-20th-century Georgia.

A century ago, when Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, key questions about Native sovereignty were left unresolved.

Times have changed since the days of Carnegie and Rockefeller, but much in philanthropy has remained the same.

To achieve a new political settlement, she has to resolve a tension dating from the Revolution.

Your grandma didn't invent that recipe.

The rivalry of two men tells the story of how Democrats fumbled with their traditional base—and how they can win again.

When video games went mainstream, the Pentagon realized their potential as a promotional tool, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on war-based games.

A legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land. Here's a glimpse of their otherworldly residences—and the end of the social experiment.

The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.

Is the car our most gendered technology?

College professors were vital in the fight to win WWII, lending their time and research to building bombs to creating effective wartime propaganda.

What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?

The same legal and cultural struggles will await the next critical infrastructural technology, and the next.

Slave states gave us the Electoral College; we should get rid of this vestige of the so-called peculiar institution.

Celilo Falls was the economic and spiritual center of the Indian world in the Pacific Northwest.

John Steinbeck beat Sanora Babb to the great American Dust Bowl novel—using her field notes. What do we owe her today?

Jane Sedgwick’s evolving ideas about her children’s natures and her ability to shape them reflected an emerging American skepticism of the perfectibility.

More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.

The classic creepy story—a driver offers a lift to a stranger who is not of this world—has deep roots and a long reach.

The legacy of Willie Mays and the Birmingham ballpark where he first made his mark.

The evolution of baseball’s perfect lineup.

Any attempt to understand the complexities of American economic thought without considering the significant role of religious beliefs is incomplete.

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

Kamala Harris called Iran a “destabilizing, dangerous force.” The appropriate context for this is the US’s own decades-long history of destabilizing Iran.

How three movies set on the Fourth of July reproduce popular myth, but reveal even more through what they leave unsaid.

On the transatlantic development of pilsners and lagers from Central Europe to the Americas.

A military consumed by identity politics threatens the integrity of the republic.

Grassroots support for public banks early in the 20th century revealed the popularity of socialism-aligned economic ideas.

Long before the rise of Trump, the American conservative mainstream enjoyed a complex partnership with the Far Right.

Exploring the role mainline Protestants have played in promoting the idea of America as a Christian country.

At its peak in the 1920s and early ’30s, the Socialist Party in Wisconsin used confrontational tactics and nonsocialists alliances to make legislative advances.

Is the United States a prisoner of its own mythology?

The Founders didn’t believe the Constitution had a fixed meaning. So why do so many of the justices?

“Against Constitutional Originalism” by historian Jonathan Gienapp could fundamentally reorient how we understand America’s founding.

Sakinah discovered Chicago’s Abortion Counseling Service, better known as Jane, because she wanted to help a friend. Then she became an essential part of it.

A new history revisits “the Trial of the Century” and its legacy in contemporary politics.

Rewriting the past by adding in what's been left out.

Longevity enthusiasts are microdosing a 19th-century cure-all. Are they onto something?

Once lauded as a wonder of the age, cocaine soon became the object of profound anxieties. What happened?

On American history and the history of the word “America.”

As the civil-rights era receded, his personal heroism loomed larger. But movement politics didn’t easily translate into party politics.

It's easy to get this one wrong.

The forces that would shape my home state’s violent history were set in motion by a 480-year-old map made by a Spanish explorer.

The origins of Linus's pumpkin deity, who "rises out of the pumpkin patch and flies through the air and brings toys to all the children in the world."

Crazy cat ladies have come to dominate this election season. It’s hardly the first time.