Excerpts

In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics.

During the Jim Crow era, working-class Washingtonians' recreation options were far more limited—and dangerous.

A location-based timeline and interactive map of the L.A. Zoot Suit Riots.

The last relics of ‘lost cause’ ideology are being removed, as a federal panel renames US military bases that honored Confederate generals.

Diners have always been considered a model of culinary democratization in the American public consciousness, but can they really be for everyone?

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drug use to expand one’s consciousness went from an intellectual pastime to an emblem of social decay.

How abolitionists viewed the American flag.

In the sixties and seventies, the Sullivanian Institute had a winning sales pitch for young New Yorkers: parties, sex, low rent, and affordable therapy.

Skepticism drove some of this more cynical or realistic worldview, based on their experiences growing up in the 70s and 80s.

Asian sailors came to the west coast of America in 1587. Within a century they were settled in colonies from Mexico to Peru.

Recently declassified documents have exposed former Mexican president José López Portillo as a CIA asset.

Harry Washington fought for his enslaver's enemy during the American Revolution. Later, he migrated to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

As the British Empire's power expanded, piracy became criminalized.

Babe Ruth's final days revealed his mortality, and made more history, when he encountered a future U.S. president.

The focus of labor history is often—unsurprisingly—workers’ organizations and what has made them thrive or languish. But employers organized, too.

Long before “transgender” entered the lexicon, Christine Jorgensen became the year’s biggest story.

His story of coming out was so shrouded in scandal, so drenched in professional embarrassment, that its broader significance may forever be overshadowed.

With more queer history detectives, what could our future look like?

We should interrogate nostalgia’s primacy without advocating for its eradication.

The 1988 presidential primary showed it wasn't always like this — and helped guide the GOP to where it is now.

On Audrey Clare Farley’s “Girls and Their Monsters.”

Quite the contrary. They used rhetoric to build a partisan community, and realized that parties needed to create and market identities, not simply agendas.

The complicated, ever-changing, millennia-long relationship between insects and humans.

A new lawsuit builds on 50 years of history in environmental activism.

As a Harvard student, Kaczynski was part of an experiment backed by the Central Intelligence Agency that one author argued shaped his worldviews.

Decades of evidence reveals that work requirements for food assistance leave people hungry and hurt the economy. But supporting them remains good politics.

In 1828, Jackson's campaign argued that an 1824 victory was stolen from him. Is it really so clear-cut?

Incarcerated musicians have crafted some of the most iconic songs in American music history while prisons reap the profits.

How Latinos have used public radio and television to communicate their cultures, histories, hopes, and concerns.

The Temecula Valley school board in Southern California wants to erase gay rights leader Harvey Milk from history, defaming him as a “pedophile” in the process.

The U.S. government’s redress program for Japanese Americans showed that the money matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters.

In the late 19th century, William Dorsey Swann's private balls attracted unwelcome attention from authorities and the press.

NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated 60 years ago. His wife, the activist Myrlie Evers-Williams, has fought for his civil rights legacy ever since.

Thomas Dixon’s racist discourse lurks in American politics and society even today.

The political preacher who made the religion look bad.

The government responded with ruthless persecution — just one egregious example in the NSA’s long, sordid history of fiercely guarding its secrecy.

Two new books reveal the story of Stanford University’s early years to be rife with corruption, autocracy, incompetence, white supremacy, and murder.

"I thought, surely after the success of 'Sesame Street' and my contribution to it, all kinds of Latinx talent would flood the media. Not so."

A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it.

“Queer” has experienced a loss of meaning and a curdling of political potential. To reinvigorate it, we need a new approach to history.

Should museums only exhibit work of their own culture, or should they bring the world to visitors?

The man behind an iconic Vietnam War image captured ‘the ugliest events of our time.'

The wildfire haze reminded some of the 1966 "killer smog" that wrapped New York in a toxic cloud. A woman recalled how her dad built a machine to save her mom.

Trans people have existed since the dawn of time. The internet has not.

The National Genealogical Society is one of the oldest, largest groups dedicated to helping families trace their ancestries.

The Fifth Amendment allows the government to buy private property for the public good. "Public good" being the expansion of white neighborhoods.

This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region.

Democratic socialists attending the 2020 Democratic Convention won’t be out of place in a city with a long history of socialist governance.

Images were important in defining the Republic between the Revolution and the Civil War and they distinctively both did and did not show Americans in need.

If labor organizers learned anything from decades of small victories and stubborn failures in the U.S. South, it was that interracial unions were hard work.