Excerpts

In "The Car," Bryan Appleyard sets out to celebrate the freedom these vehicles granted. But what if they were a dangerous technology from the start?

As environmental rights seem on the verge of a comeback, it’s worth remembering why they once seemed so promising, and why that promise remains unfulfilled.

Nearly 20 years after their deployment to Iraq, veterans grapple with their younger selves and try to make sense of the war.

The same ideas that have harmed D.C. for more than a century are again rearing their ugly head.

A Spanish-language pamphlet by Cotton Mather explodes the Black-versus-white binary that dominates most discussions of race in our time.

Conjugal visits were first allowed as incentives for the forced labor of incarcerated Black men, the practice expanding from there. Is human touch a right?

Archival records of Black southerners' military desertion tribunals can be read as a distinct form of political action.

The new program might strengthen personal connections to refugees, but history shows there are potential downsides, as well.

The unlikely, true story of the Westinghouse “We Can Do It” work-incentive poster that became an international emblem of women’s empowerment.

The Globetrotters have always been far more than just a comic exhibition team, just as sports have always meant much more than escapism.

Seeing through empathy with Diane Arbus.

The man who changed America.

Three recent books examine the discrimination and hypocrisy at the heart of policing “vice.”

A new book about the first lady reveals how she and the ailing President Woodrow Wilson silenced their critics.

How should historians respond to the urgency of this current political moment?

All coed camps can be like this. But Jewish ones were different.

Carter’s work in Zimbabwe forms a significant and underappreciated part of his legacy.

Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book chronicles the tumultuous period leading up to the Mexican Revolution, casting the border as ground zero for continental change.

How a celebrated corporate lawyer named Elihu Root became the driving force behind some of the worst U.S. atrocities ever perpetrated abroad.

The Black Woman’s Organizing Archive highlights work in the 19th and 20th centuries that benefitted Black women and American society as a whole.

Greene probably has visions of suburban Atlanta in the 1990s and 2000s, not the Civil War.

One obvious change occurred at around the turn of the 19th century, when the rapid expansion of the canning industry brought canned pumpkin to every market.

The pecan pie as we know it is very much a twentieth-century creation, so if you ever see a recipe entitled “Old South Pecan Pie,” you know it’s bogus.

Sixty-five years after Russell Lee photographed New Mexico homesteaders coping with the Depression, a Lee admirer visits the town for a fresh slice of life

Neither apples nor the pie originally came from America, but Americans have made this dish their own

Ever since Thoreau headed to Walden, our attention has been wandering.

To demand the freedom to mourn—not on the employer’s schedule, but in our own time—is to reject the cruel rhythms of the capitalist status quo.

Involuntarily committing people with serious mental illness, however well intended, has long served to remove them from society instead of providing treatment.

The right—and wrong—lessons of the Iraq War.

How the institution’s reactionary origins still leak into today’s film culture.

The philosophy that drives the GOP's attacks on government and how it has fueled some of our biggest problems.

A set of revered stone deities stolen from a temple in northwestern India can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking.

News organizations air lies from political figures more often than you’d think, but for very different reasons than Fox News.

A Harvard education professor explains how far we've come in answering some of the most important questions in education since the famous Coleman report.

In 1903 Mine Westbye moved to North Dakota to live a life "so quiet you almost feel afraid."

The vexed history of "Night Life" in the New Yorker.

The fate of Raleigh's 11 missing freedman's villages.

The 1958 civil rights protest by Black teens led to the end of segregation at lunch counters all over the state and inspired a wave of sit-ins across the country.

Does marijuana prohibition have racist origins? Where did ideas of “reefer madness” come from? This project looks to the historical record for answers.

More than just an upset, "Saving Private Ryan" losing the Best Picture Oscar to "Shakespeare in Love" changed how Academy Awards are won.

For many historians today, the present is forever trapped in the past and defined by the worst of it.

A seven-point memo proposing control of the global insulin market.

The fire of 1874 destroyed more than 80% of Black-owned property in Chicago. But Black people persisted and built vital cultural traditions and institutions.

Why a powerful House Republican wants to ban a common insurance practice.

Elkison v. Deliesseline presented a federal court with the question of whether a state could incarcerate and enslave a free subject of a foreign government.

An analysis of the factors that contributed to NYC's massive financial crisis in the 1970s, and the austere solutions that perpetuated it.

A zealot through and through, he ran the FBI like a religious sect.

For decades, conservatives were fine with sexually charged cross-dressing entertainment — so long as it reinforced traditional power structures.

A conversation with presidential biographers Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird.

The film “deliberately maligned the upper class,” according to a report that didn’t like the portrayal of Mr. Potter as a bad guy.