Excerpts

It’s difficult to read the gender of children in many old photos. That’s because coding American children via clothing didn’t begin until the 1920s.

Calamanco footwear was sturdy, egalitarian, and made in the U.S.A.

The railroad baron and governor of California was starkly contradictory and infamously disruptive.

Mack McCormick’s long, tortured quest to find the real Robert Johnson.

After Emancipation, Black people fought for public benefits like pensions that would make their newly won citizenship meaningful.

What the Medicine Wheel, an indigenous American model of time, shows about apocalypse.

In Joshua Bennett’s history of spoken word, poetry is alive and well thanks to a movement that began in living rooms and bars.

Domestic glass manufacturing in the U.S. remains concentrated in the Rust Belt. But studio glassblowing is adding relevance to a long forgotten material.

An unprepossessing townhouse in the East Village has been central to a series of distinctive events in New York City history.

Exploring recent debates about the uses–and utility–of Black history in both the academic and public spheres.

One of the cases on which the judge relies said the opposite of what he claims it did.

In northern Louisiana, white supremacists slaughtered 150 African Americans, brutally thwarting their hopes for autonomy and self-governance.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk rationalized his medication abortion opinion through a distorted reading of the long-dormant 1873 law.

Targeted even when unarmed, around 70 percent of the Black Union troops who fought in the 1864 battle died as a result of the clash.

Anthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of art and sex, is suddenly relevant again thanks to Donald Trump’s worst judge.

Thirty years later, an avoidable tragedy has spawned a politically ascendant mythology.

A far right politics that developed in the middle of the 20th century has prevented Democrats from gaining as they have in suburbs elsewhere.

A conversation with some of the hottest filmmakers on the scene: They're young, they're Black, but they're making green.

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.

A new book chronicles the decades-long fight to legalize abortion in the United States.

Why the Exodus must remain central to the African American church.

With the Comstock Act of 1873 coming back to life, reproductive care, LGBTQ protections, and a host of other civil rights are now at risk.

America’s classification crisis.

Once a key element in Native economies of the region, clams and oysters became a reliable source of free protein for working-class and poor urban dwellers.

Our own world is built from copper, and so too will future worlds be.

From the 1920s-1940s, North, West, and South Philadelphia saw its Black population increase by 50-80% as white flight occurred.

Children’s entertainment always embodies local values.

Aaron Burr spoke of far-flung fortune, and then the Blennerhassetts’ West Virginia Eden went up in flames.

Poe’s story of a treasure hunt, revealing the fantastical writer’s hyper-rational penchant for cracking codes.

The congressman is the strongest link in American politics between the early 1960s--the glory days of the civil rights movement--and the 1990s.

Sacagawea is a symbol for everything from Manifest Destiny to women’s rights to American diversity. Except we don't know much about her.

Senator Pat McCarran’s vision for the desert carried a tradition of dispossession into the mid-20th century.

Migration further west began almost immediately after Reconstruction ended, as Black Americans initiated the "Great Exodus" outside the South toward Kansas.

Had Bob Dylan not written a song about it, the 1963 killing of a black servant by a white socialite’s cane might have been long forgotten.

Pat Tillman’s life and death is an all-American story. It’s just not the kind that Donald Trump and his supporters want it to be.

In 1970, Angela Davis was arrested on suspicion of murder. The trial — and her eventual victory — proved to everyone that the justice system was corrupt.

A careful examination of the Privileges or Immunities Clause shows what we lost 150 years ago.

In the 20th century, a moral economy of “whites-only” wealth animated federal policies and programs that created the propertied white middle class.

Colonial currencies and the pan-American origins of the dollar system.

The story of America's oldest counterfeiters and why the Civil War spurred the Secret Service into hunting them down.

Looking for an easy buck, con artists in the early 1900s infamously "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge to immigrants fresh off the boat.

A CIA memo shows that US officials considered his execution a crucial victory—but they were mistaken in believing Che’s ideas could be buried along with his body.

Washington may be the only city on Earth that lobbied itself into existence.

During World War II, almost a half million POWs were interned in the United States, where they forged sympathetic relationships with Black American soldiers.

The Klan dens of the heartland were powerful, vicious, and ambitious. Indiana was their bastion.

Forty years ago, Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff, and a whole host of Texas misfits brought the hippies and rednecks together in outlaw country.

A network of "morale wardens" tracked down the latest scuttlebutt.

“I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” Twain said. “It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.”

Staten Island gets a lot of disrespect from other New Yorkers, some of it fair. But it has its own fascinating people’s history.

The medication abortion decision by a federal judge in Texas focused on the rights of fetuses and the interests of doctors — not the rights of women.