Excerpts

By thinking big, Shawn Fain is summoning memories of Walter Reuther and the autoworkers’ union’s finest hour.

The first UAW strike was in the 1930s. Over the next century, the union amassed significant power while demanding higher wages, better benefits and protections.

In the early years of Brooklyn’s gentrification, a 1977 New Yorker piece by Jervis Anderson captured the process in a freeze-frame.

On September 4, 1973, an enormous multitude of Chileans poured into the streets of Santiago to back the besieged government of Salvador Allende.

Betty and Barney Hill lost three hours on a New Hampshire highway in 1961. They spent years trying to understand it.

Hudson Yards received a $6 billion cocktail of public subsidies, including tax breaks and infrastructure improvements, to create a billionaires' playground.

In his latest work of history, Edward Ayers captures daily life along with the military and political moves.

The photojournalist Bud Lee captured the riots of 1967 and the human cost of the brutal police crackdown.

Many faiths face conflicts over institutional control. In Latter-day Saints history, the episode around the ‘September Six’ is particularly memorable.

There's more to Gerald Ford, "the son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch,” than Watergate.

A work of millennial scope by a self-taught African-American historian.

Societies celebrate heroes and commemorate tragedies. But why is there so little public acknowledgment of environmental disasters?

What does the academy have against the mother of second-wave feminism?

The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation.

What Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story reveals about America.

A worldwide effort to heal damage to the ozone layer is showing early progress.

Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 

How the Plattsburg camps tried (and failed) to raise a volunteer army ahead of World War I.

As Confederate monuments were erected, people turned out to vote in lower numbers in predominantly Black areas.

Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.

A more sympathetic look at Aaron Burr, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton.

Were Harriet Boyd and Cora Stewart rivals in Greece in 1897? The fog of war has obscured a groundbreaking tale.

A new book identifies the 1968 Democratic convention as the moment when broad public regard for the news media gave way to widespread distrust, and American divisiveness took off.

“It is true that my life has been threatened as the leader of this playground campaign,” wrote Mabel E. Macomber in 1929 from Brooklyn’s Bedford neighborhood.

Friedan was indispensable to second-wave feminism. And yet she was difficult to like.

The 50th anniversary of a groundbreaking work.

A conversation about the Cold War’s profound and negative influence on the liberal worldview.

"Liberalism Against Itself" makes an incoherent attack on liberalism.

During World War II, the OSS sent Moe Berg to Europe, where he gathered intel on Germany's efforts to build an atomic bomb.

In "American Slavers," Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

During World War II, proto–music videos called “soundies” blared pop patriotism from visual jukeboxes across American bars.

A re-examination of the Age of Exploration may have more than a little to teach us about modern venture capitalists.

Harriet Beecher Stowe said that Josiah Henson’s life had inspired her most famous character. But Henson longed to be recognized by his own name.

Former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, largely silent for 60 years, says he found a bullet in Kennedy’s limo. Here's why that’s so significant, if true.

When I looked at the archives, I found a history hidden in plain sight.

The 1941 strike, following the spectacular success of “Snow White,” stunned Walt Disney and rattled his now-storied company.

Executives feared their newsreel footage would “cause riots and mass hysteria.”

Frank Church and the committee that investigated the US intelligence agencies.

The expansion of higher education in Virginia uprooted hundreds of black families.

One act of generosity during the Great Famine forged a bond that transcends generations.

The Christian right is pushing a slate of laws to stop a new, vague offense they have dubbed “abortion trafficking.”

Repression, mediation, and division of Black resistance from 1906 to the 2020 George Floyd Uprising.

When it comes to the left, the state uses RICO to criminalize radicals as thieves and separate them from a broader base of support.

Some personal reflections on history, memory, and the survival of democracies.

Few realize that the approval process for these outdoor signs varies widely by state and organization, enabling unsanctioned displays to slip through.

Two family histories by Americans connected to Europe’s twentieth century through their fascist grandfathers seek to occupy the void between history and memory.

On Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.”

Favorite slur too racist? Replace it.

Lord, implored President Biden, let us "turn the page" on the War on Terror. Just not yet.

For decades, the military fired explosives on Vieques. The US citizens who live there still face the consequences.