Excerpts

The backlash against an effort to resettle 200,000 evacuees holds lessons for future disasters.

Some Americans who have lost faith in traditional institutions are finding spirituality in this Denver church—and in themselves.

The paper angered colonial officials by repeating a scandalous rumor and condemning a British alliance with the Mohawk.

Jonathan Schell’s account of the US military’s destruction of the village of Ben Suc in Vietnam laid bare the problem with many American interventions.

Anti-immigrant think tanks and advocacy groups operated on the margins until Trump became president. Now they have molded not only the GOP but also Democrats.

In contemporary publishing, novels fixated on the past rather than the present have garnered the most attention and prestige.

Originalism is not so much an idea as a legal-industrial complex divided into three parts—the academic, the jurisprudential, and the political.

Many vignettes of sheriffs in action are dramatic and alarming. But how representative are they?

How a single phrase or blunder can end up dominating our political discourse.

Culture wars have a long and divisive history in American politics, with gender, race and religion continuing to inflame public opinion.

The deep roots of debt relief activism in the United States.

The late telejournalist was a pioneer of informal diplomacy between American and Soviet citizens.

On the literary and cinematic legacy of white supremacy in the United States.

The path to winning the Black vote no longer runs through the church door.

The court’s ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson involves highly selective readings of the historiography and a willful misrepresentation of history.

As the nation’s highest court debated Native sovereignty, I was in the archives, uncovering family stories entwined with those debates.

Some scholars say that it’s to blame for our political dysfunction—and that we need to start over.

Newly-released FBI files show a lot of strange threats against the former secretary of state’s safety—and say a lot about 1970s America.

Scientists and lawmakers in the 70s knew more than we think they did about climate change and the impacts of fossil fuel regulations.

The relationship between presidents and vice presidents is unique and often personal. Sometimes, internal divisions spill out into public life.

For American politicians, the obsession with appealing to the everyman dates back to the raucous campaign of 1840.

Scarry’s guides to life both reflected and bolstered kids’ lived experience, and in some cases even provided the template for it.

Historians may never speak of an “Age of Adams” to rival Andrew Jackson, but Randall Woods’s new biography reveals the sixth president’s greatness.

Anthony Comstock, Victoria Woodhull, and what a battle from the 1870s means for 2024 and reproductive rights.

It was no coincidence that public school secularization and desegregation were happening, and failing, simultaneously.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. tried America First. This philosophy helped lead to World War II.

On July 2, 1881, less than a year after President James Garfield was elected the 20th president of the United States, he was shot by Charles Guiteau.

An expert on white nationalism explains how such demonizing rhetoric incubates and spreads—and what sets this particular episode apart.

Why did so many American Jewish women find Christian Science appealing?

A scene of conflict that was lost to the ages has been unearthed, assembling an indigenous perspective on events at the very root of America’s founding.

The yuppies embodied the winning side of America’s deepening economic divide. Bruce Springsteen spoke for those left behind.

A new book tells the story of American communism as an integral part of 20th-century US history, with Communists “as social critics and social change agents.”

Americans are seized by conspiracy theories, and as a result, democracy is in peril—so conventional wisdom holds.

On Nelson Rockefeller and the disappearance of moderate Republicans from American politics.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s tacit support for a program that jailed sex workers suggests the limits of the elite-led reform efforts she championed.

For as long as universities have existed, academics have struggled to impart their knowledge to students. The failing is fixable—if Washington demands it.

In the early 19th century, US elites demonized the self-liberated slaves of the Haitian Revolution as dangerous practitioners of barbaric rituals.

Many founders expressed their hope that slavery would be abolished, while simultaneously exerting themselves to defend it.

What the three-fifths clause meant at ratification.

"They’re eating the pets of the people that live there," former President Trump claimed — with no basis — at the first presidential debate.

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest.

The Power Broker leaves us ill-equipped to understand or confront the struggles that face the city today.

Trump’s baseless claims about migrants in Ohio reflect a long history of prejudice against Haitians. In Washington, those falsehoods have driven policy.

A culture of reverence for the U.S. Constitution shields the founding document from criticism, despite its many shortcomings.

The beloved family show left a lasting legacy.

Segregated lives of pride and peril on Firestone's Liberian plantations.

The former president’s grotesque demagoguery is just the latest in a long line of vicious attacks on residents and immigrants from the island nation.

How an American arms dealer and a surplus of guns in Europe after World War II popularized gun ownership.

The candidate's potential ties to an Irish slave owner invite us to reexamine Ireland’s multilayered historical identity.

For the English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.