Excerpts

Obama’s official oral history contains new evidence of his indifference and foot-dragging on the most important issue of our time.

The recent documentary "The US and the Holocaust" is a scathing, even bombastic indictment of US immigration policy over the past 160 years.

An effort to memorialize the homestead of one of Oregon’s first Black farmers illuminates the land’s complicated history.

The unity of two long-neglected communities during trying times is a reminder of what we desperately need in Los Angeles.

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.

How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?

The Reagan administration thought Surgeon General C. Everett Koop would put his faith above public health. Instead, Koop sent all Americans a mailer on AIDS.

The view from nowhere came from somewhere.

The argument made recently by Kim Forde-Mazrui may not be in good faith, but it does raise important questions about the meaning of the Constitution.

The genocide of Native Americans was nowhere more methodically savage than in California. A new state initiative seeks to reckon with this history.

Social movements that have pushed for inclusion and equality in the South have often evaded or ignored the issue of Native land and sovereignty.

Two decades passed before the ghosts of the Rosenbergs came back to haunt Irving Kaufman, the judge who sentenced them to death.

“Transgender” has gone from an umbrella term for different behaviors, to an umbrella term for different identities.

Likely the child of Martha's son from her first marriage, William Costin used his position to advocate for D.C.'s free Black community.

Botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter braved rapids and steep cliffs to catalog numerous plant species.

“Forced labor” conflates different forms of labor throughout history and minimizes the uniquely brutal conditions of chattel slavery.

The rediscovery of demos performed by the songwriters of the legendary Memphis recording studio reveals a hidden history of soul.

The roots of anti-gay attitudes lay in white supremacy.

The war marked a sea change in how black men viewed their own citizenship.

Live entertainment, all genders and straight people are back—and were here in the beginning

How an autism diagnosis became both a clinical label and an identity; a stigma to be challenged and a status to be embraced.

A story of a mistaken identity reveals a lot about the history of black women in America, the challenges of understanding the past, and who we are today.

They called her ACM, but never, ever, to her face.

Breakfast cereal, dietary purity, and race.

To appreciate who Whitman was, we have to reinterpret the poet in ways that have made generations of critical gatekeepers uncomfortable.

When Silent Spring was published, the response was overtly gendered. Rachel Carson's critics depicted her as hysterical, mystical, and witchy.

The expulsion of two Black lawmakers from the Tennessee House recalls an earlier expulsion of dozens of Black lawmakers from Georgia's General Assembly.

It was the scene of “the most successful racial cleansing in U.S. history,” and the results of that history were still on display during her years in high school there.

If Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had his way, the state’s past of lynching Blacks would be taught as an exception rather than the rule. History tells a different story.

Isaac Murphy was once called ‘The Prince of Jockeys’ during the fleeting era when African Americans reigned on the nation’s racetracks.

The heart of this book is the sharp and disjointed accounts of survivors, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise.

In the late Sixties, countercultural media was distributed by the Underground Press Syndicate and bankrolled by marijuana.

More than 50 years after the Stonewall uprising marked the birth of a movement for LGBTQ+ rights, transgender activists continue to push for inclusion.

On Chuck Berry.

The Supreme Court Justice's defense of Plessy v. Ferguson in a 1993 memo continues to influence the court's interpretation of the 14th amendment.

Jackie Robinson is popularly portrayed as the man who broke baseball’s color line by quietly enduring racist abuse. But that narrative is much too narrow.

The 1954 Supreme Court decision, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, declared that “separate but equal” has no place in education.

A cooking assignment helps illuminate the lives of Jewish women in the past for students.

Decades ago, labor protests, picketing and strikes often led to violent confrontations between activists and police, although that almost never happens today.

How a folklorist encourages people to experience the past and present of a place.

Reflections from the Naming Commission, and the front lines of the army's war on the Lost Cause.

In 1910, a failed House bill sought to increase the availability of low-cost meat by importing hippopotamuses that would be killed to make "lake cow bacon."

Anna Rosenberg had massive influence in American politics for 40 years. Remembering her story offers a guide for solving problems today.

She was a woman, but she was not the author of the speech attributed to her in popular lore.

As a movement, it has imploded. As a credo, it’s here to stay.

Sigmund Freud once applied his Oedipal theory to the leader of the free world.

In the pages of "Black Mask" magazine, the Continental Op and Race Williams fought the KKK even as they shared its love of vigilante justice.

When a pair of college friends with a knack for comedy met up with a musical double act, they had the ingredients for a sensation.

Members of what is perhaps the oldest Asian community in the United States are committed to preserving—and sharing—their story.