Excerpts

Once highly valuable, salt affords a new look at life, environment, and sovereignty in the southwest borderlands.

Thousands of Indigenous children suffered and died in residential ‘schools’ around the world. Their stories must be heard.

"Outlander" challenges the myth of American exceptionalism at the root of much U.S. popular culture.

On the mismatched sporting advice of Clair Bee and John R. Tunis.

The long-term impact of Quarles’s work.

In 1939, inspired by the popularity of iced tea, a cooperative of coffee growers launched a decades-long campaign to convince Americans to drink iced coffee.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was the fateful moment that the wave of hope finally broke for Black America.

Until more Americans know what happened in periods such as the Gilded Age, they can’t protect themselves from those who abuse history to advance poor policy.

What eight decades of "Goofus and Gallant" illustrate about society’s changing expectations of children.

Did Richmond violate the Voting Rights Act by adding thousands of White residents? The historic Supreme Court case foreshadowed today’s gerrymandering fights.

Size-based health and beauty ideals emanated from eugenic pseudoscientific postulates, and BMI continues to advance white supremacist embodiment norms. 

Moral panics repeat, again and again.

As record temperatures bake portions of the United States this summer, a Chicago heat wave in 1995 offers a grim preview of the toll from climate change.

The "father of the atomic bomb" has long been misunderstood. Will the new film finally get J. Robert Oppenheimer right?

How much truth and healing can forensic tech really bring? On the sites of Native American tragedies, Marsha Small has made it her life’s mission to find out.

To remain exclusively white after Brown v. Board of education, universities created scholarships to send qualified Black students to out-of-state HBCUs instead.

Before the eagerly-anticipated film hits our screens, we take a look back at the story of the world's most famous doll.

An opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas exposed the limits of originalism.

It turns out there was an "unlikely" chance the first atomic bomb could have ignited the atmosphere — which didn’t stop the Manhattan Project.

Loved and loathed, the toy stirs fresh controversy at age 64.

Real democratic participation in foreign policy is almost unimaginable today—but this wasn’t always the case.

The motivations behind the Nixon administration’s decisions and use of ultimate discretion to exclude or deport were political and self-interested.

That history has nothing to do with culture wars, and everything to do with what real justice looks like in the United States, and who has access to it.

Quarantine at the Lazaretto met many migrants when they arrived in 19th-century Philadelphia.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, many labor regulations in the US have been crafted with the express purpose of strengthening the male-breadwinner family.

The tramp picks up his bowler hat and cane for the first time.

Reflecting on the trailblazing chemist’s fight for dignity and the myths we tell about our scientific heroes.

The presence of Federalist judges frustrated Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party, bring justice Samuel Chase under fire.

Can (and should) conservatives reclaim feminism from the radicals?

Don DeLillo's Cold Wars.

Popular culture and social critique through Rogers' writing and Guthrie's songs.

At least 12 Black chemists and physicists worked as primary researchers on the team that developed the technology behind the atomic bomb.

These caricatures of well-known Philadelphians transpose human heads onto animal forms.

The controversial historian drew criticism from both left and right. We need more like him today.

A relic of WWI that helped destroy the anti-war left, it remains a threat to news outlets, political organizers, and challengers of the surveillance state.

A camp diva, a queer icon, and a model of feminism—the memorable Mae West left behind a complicated legacy, on and off the stage.

Though technologies have altered information warfare, the underlying principles remain unchanged since the day-to-day operations of the Continental Army.

The Law and Economics movement was one front in the decades-long advance of a revived free-market ideology that became the new American consensus.

On Darryl Holter and Stephen Gee’s “Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City, 1900–1930.”

Community cookbooks provide a perspective on the American melting pot.

The politicized rhetoric linking race and welfare has a long, ingrained history.

In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar America.

Development and dispossession as a two-pronged conquest.

Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton lived an unapologetic life that transcended genres and gender norms beyond her bluesy hit song and the “Elvis moment.”

Women have been punching each other in the face (during boxing matches) since the early 1700s.

In the eighteenth century, if people in British North America had to travel, they stayed at public houses that were often just repurposed private homes.

An intellectual history.

The Manson Family murders weren’t a countercultural revolt. They were about power, entitlement, and Hollywood.

Digital communications allowed transgender individuals and organizations the digital tools to organize and connect at a previously impossible scale and speed.

And justified the most extreme responses.