Excerpts

In “Spoiled,” the culinary historian Anne Mendelson takes aim at the American fallacy of fresh milk as a wonder food.

The straightforward way in which Google answers this query is a case study in how new science becomes accepted as fact in the modern era of rapid communication.

Police from as far away as Alabama were watching.

The movie has no interest in reducing the atomic bombings to a trivializing, exploitative spectacle, despite what some would want.

King offered Americans the choice between acting in accordance with the Constitution and resistance to change.  In many ways, we face the same choice today.

Historians should watch films like Judas and the Black Messiah as much for their filmmaking as their history making.

A wrestler, a Sunday school teacher, and a mystery man walk into a studio.

The earliest-known version of the dish was a winey, briny, bready casserole.

While most Jewish immigrants flocked to urban centers, a few -- like the Greenbergs -- tried their luck as homesteaders.

A historic 1908 conference transcended party and personal interest for the ‘common good.'

The Peshtigo fire ran through 17 towns and killed more than 1,000. It was worsened by a dry season and extreme winds — not dissimilar to what happened in Maui.

The Post interviewed March on Washington participants and voices from younger generations to tell the story of Aug. 28, 1963 and what it means now.

Suspicions have long swirled around unscrupulous campaign manager William Casey. We believe the evidence is now overwhelming.

Prominent institutions, such as the Smithsonian, have historically erased or omitted US women from archival records.

The welfare rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s resisted invasive policies. Their animating vision: that society treat every mother and child with dignity.

James McBride’s new novel tells a story of solidarity between Black and Jewish communities.

Exploring the origins and impacts of the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," on that event's 50th anniversary.

The so-called "father of the bomb" helped bring us prematurely into the age of existential risk.

Coming from the Congo, I knew where an essential ingredient for atomic bombs was mined, even if everyone else seemed to ignore it.

For decades, locals believed landscape architect Jens Jensen designed this twisty stretch of Highway 42—the real history is even more serpentine.

Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?

A close look at the grand compromise of 1976.

Governor Ralph Northam pardoned seven young Black men put to death in 1951— a step forward in addressing Virginia's imperfect criminal justice system.

Discover the stories, spaces, and people of the American Revolutionary War era through maps, interpretive essays, and interactives.

The radical approach employed by black leftists at the Amenia conference set the stage for the civil rights unionism that would help topple Jim Crow.

In “Liberalism Against Itself,” Samuel Moyn stresses the need to resuscitate an earlier and more rousing wave of thinkers.

Might a world republic provide humanity with the tools to address the climate emergency, runaway artificial intelligence, and new weapons of mass extermination?

The records of a New York surveillance committee from the time of the First Red Scare document a radical world—and its demise.

There is no acknowledgement in the film of the existence of downwinders from the test, in New Mexico or elsewhere.

“We could afford to end poverty,” Matthew Desmond tells us. That we don’t is a choice.

American leaders called the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki our 'least abhorrent choice,' but there were alternatives to the nuclear attacks.

Why our nuclear fears faded – and why that’s dangerous.

How August Wilson became one of the country’s most influential playwrights.

J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project scientists are a rare example of weapons designers who have gone down in history.

South Korea is finally being held to account for the carnage its mercenary troops inflicted on Vietnamese civilians. No one seems to be reckoning with our complicity.

Richard Nixon decided a powerful new medium should appeal to the marketplace, not to citizens.

A Smithsonian curator John Troutman and a blues musician discuss a new folk album, "Playing for the Man at the Door," from late chronicler Mack McCormick's collection.

Here’s what it’s like to report on the process as an Indigenous journalist.

The Federal Home Loan Bank Board openly admitted to operating as the Johnny Appleseed of redlining, sowing its seeds into the private financial system.

A-bomb architect “was no Einstein,” historian says, but he did Nobel-level work on black holes.

Smith collected rare books, paper airplanes, Pennsylvania Dutch tools—and harvested the folk music recordings that changed a generation.

A new book argues that American politics are defined by unfulfilled desire.

The Truman administration launched a PR campaign to inflate casualty numbers to justify the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Florida’s new standards for teaching social studies include throwbacks to an interpretation of slavery as benign or inconsequential.

In Hip hop’s “golden era,” the period from 1987 to 1994, rappers used their platforms to bring attention to issues plaguing poor and working-class Black communities.

The Smithsonian’s human brains collection was led by Ales Hrdlicka, a museum curator in the 1900s who believed that White people were superior.

“The Lost Colony” had dramatized American mythology in the Outer Banks since 1937 with White actors as Indians. Now, Native performers are rewriting the story.

A new chronicle of redwood logging exposes how a cadre of wealthy industrialists reaped a fortune in the name of environmentalism.

A journalist seeks to capture the "spirit" of Oak Ridge.

Historians owe a debt of gratitude to these furry pilferers.