Excerpts

More than 30 years ago, the "French paradox" got America bleary-eyed.

The ethnic enclave in Lower Manhattan was home to refugees fleeing civil war and entrepreneurs taking advantage of a globalizing economy.

First, the GOP became the party of tax cuts and now it won't touch entitlements — which makes a balanced budget nearly impossible.

Nasology was a 19th century pseudoscience which claimed to explain personality traits based on the shape of a person’s nose.

Philadelphia portrait studios in the Age of the Daguerreotype (1840-1849).

One hundred years ago, a group of U.S. academics and soldiers revolutionized warfare. We’re still seeing the results today.

A new book makes the case for a more pragmatic anti-policing movement—one that seeks to build working-class solidarity across racial lines.

The 1982 attack against Vincent Chin redefined hate crimes and energized a push for today’s stronger legal protections.

The conservative comedian spoke out for gay rights and gun control, and got boycotted and ostracized by friends on the right, including Ronald Reagan.

The new documentary “I Am Everything” explores the gulf between what Richard accomplished and what he got for it.

Already prone to boiler explosions that regularly killed scores of passengers, steamboats were pushed to their limits in races that valued speed over safety.

Seventy years after a disgraceful episode of anti-LGTBQ history, we are facing a new wave of McCarthyist fearmongering.

The secret history and unlearned lessons of the Cuban missile crisis.

The history and context of the made-up aesthetics of the early Ku Klux Klan.

Out of a common history emerged racism, capitalism, and the whole world. This offers us a clue on how to change that world.

A new biography of Phillis Wheatley places her in her era and shows the ways she used poetry to criticize the existence of slavery.

Professor Blackhawk’s new volume attempts to put Native peoples’ stories at the center of the history of the United States.

A short history of a misunderstood literary genre and the world it created.

The lessons of the past for suburban affordable housing advocates.

"Women of the Republic," published in 1980, has introduced generations to the role of women in the American Revolution and the possibilities of women’s history.

Carter’s austerity was part of a bigger project. It didn’t really have much to do with environmentalism.

Richard Nixon helped establish Earth Day and poured millions of dollars into conservation, despite his own ambivalence about the environmental movement.

What might Charles Dickens have thought about the American Civil War and the American struggle for abolition and social reforms?

Using oral histories of early East Texas oil workers, recorded in the 1950s, we hear about the chaos and excess that accompanied the discovery of oil.

The story of the oil shocks of 1973 and how they continue to shape the world we live in today.

Called Art War Relief, members from a group of art societies formed a coalition under the auspices of the American Red Cross.

How a historian's family history informed her professional quest to unpack the stories white Southerners told about themselves.

Why some antebellum reformers thought convents were incompatible with "true womanhood."

“The End of History?” was an announcement of victory. But a quarter-century later, its author remains unsure if liberalism truly won.

The Nixon administration saw methadone as a way to reduce crime rather than treat addiction.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" series is the best introduction for a child to virtues indispensable to liberty.

The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it.

How digital media pursued viral traffic at all costs and unleashed chaos.

How the Source Family, a radical 1970s utopian commune, still impacts what we eat today.

In the early 1900s heyday of the Socialist Party, Texas boasted a vibrant state party that attracted oppressed farmers in droves.

Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.

After the Spanish conquest, horses transformed Native American tribes much earlier than historians thought.

A mass murderer of 1955.

Jefferson’s system depended on shoring up the bulwarks of race and basing the law on a theory of government that withdrew protection from unfavored groups.

Lincoln's understanding of the preconditions for genuine democracy, and of its necessity, were rooted in this rich soil. And with his help, ours could be, too.

Gardner's public service did not end with her lifelong advocacy for women's equality, but continued even after her death.

How Black women used exercise to achieve civic goals in the late nineteenth century.

While other explorers may claim credit for discovering the North Pole, an unsung and largely forgotten former sharecropper has as good a case as anyone.

Efforts to pinpoint early cases have been complicated, and in some cases compromised, by distractions and diversions.

Native peoples face similar struggles with the federal governments in the U.S. and in Canada.

Though their wishes were often overshadowed, soldier-patients had voices.

In Candyman, the notorious Cabrini-Green complex is haunted by urban myths and racial paranoia.

A generation is still dying younger than it should—this time, of “natural causes.”

The historical record says we shouldn’t be surprised.

A food writer's reminiscences of local cuisine in the springtime.