Excerpts

An argument against looking at our past through the lens of today.

The prospect of removing people from communities to be put in institutions has been a project of social control.

In football, prayer is—and has always been—political.

Nearly one hundred years before enslaved African arrived in Jamestown, the Spanish brought 100 slaves to the coast of what is now Georgia or South Carolina.

Connecting the Haitian Revolution and abolition in the 1834 Tennessee Constitutional Convention.

Conservatives’ veneration for the founders opens the door for a secular vision for America’s public schools.

Why are Chicago’s race riots of 1919 overlooked in the city’s collective memory? A new project tells the stories of the 38 killed, and the legacy of racism in the U.S.

The sudden ubiquity of sportswear might seem a little odd. But almost every feature of modern fashion was once adapted from athletics.

Why are Georgia peaches so iconic? The answer has a lot to do with slavery — its end and a need for the South to rebrand itself.

A music critic assesses Elvis Presley's influence on popular culture.

The increasingly militant right supports the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.

A brief history of theater fires in New York City—and the regulations that helped people escape them.

At the frontier of American empire.

The tale of the long forgotten Joseph Jefferson, who revolutionized character acting in 19th century American theater.

On the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment, we should reflect on the arduous battle to rid the nation once and for all of the ‘peculiar institution.’

Liberians in West Fargo trying to dodge racism are deeply woven into American history.

A Washington Post investigation of more than 400 artworks in the U.S. Capitol building found that one-third honor enslavers or Confederates.

During the heyday of the Chicano Movement, school walkouts were organized to disrupt what activists called “the ongoing mis-education of Chicano students.”

On the laughing emptiness at the center of the Republican Party.

Manhattan Project physicist was infamously stripped of his security clearance in 1954.

Lessons from the start of the Cold War.

The story of the 1890 massacre was often about the end of Native American resistance to US expansion. But that’s not how everyone told it.

19th-century African American writer Charles Chesnutt’s subversive literature.

How the unsustainable growth of the container ship industry led to the supply chain crisis.

What degree of legitimacy by voters does a public institution need in a democracy, and how much independence do experts in such an institution need to do their job?

A two-volume biography tracks the life and times of one of Harlem’s leading socialists.

"The Custom of the Country" and its unique relationship with ideas of feminism and the culture of the early 20th century elite.

For its ubiquity and richness, the American library building stands as a reflection of the country’s enlightened calling.

In opulent seaside Newport, a wealthy and beloved Black businessman turns up dead. The resulting trial will tear the town in two.

The story of the girl who grew up in Pasadena, took the bus, loved her mom and grandmother, and wrote herself into the world.

After Texas Rangers and ranchers shot 15 unarmed men and boys in 1918, Porvenir killings were largely forgotten.

This delicious sticky treat has quite the American origin story.

Legend says that the campaign to save abused children in New York was driven by the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The truth is more complicated.

Game theory, computers, the atom bomb—these are just a few of things von Neumann played a role in developing, changing the 20th century for better and worse.

The bonfire was a public spectacle for Black people, as well as any white dissenters. It was a calculated warning.

A catalog of cleanup efforts at the 50-plus sites where uranium was processed for nuclear weapons, where polluted water and sickness were often left behind.

Still’s detailed record of radical abolitionist action remains a model for creating freedom out of community and community out of freedom.

Their plan required not only a social and legal division along racial lines but a political one, too — a separation that persists today.

The Library of Congress has the only complete version of the original 1948 release.

Fuel for the revolution came from a source familiar today: distorted news reports used to drum up enthusiasm for overthrowing an illegitimate government.

Mills exposed postwar American power and warned of an authoritarian turn in the book, which speaks to our own moment of inequality and right-wing anger.

The FBI’s first director built the agency around some of his own worst instincts.

Smith's influence on American politics, and the misunderstanding at the heart of our idea of the "champion of capitalism."

In Chris Herring’s recent history of the New York basketball team, we get a behind-the-scenes look at the sports commentariat’s fixation on grit and toughness.

The railroad company remains a site for Americans to grapple with key questions about the nature of American capitalism.

A 40-year saga of kickbacks, threats, political maneuvering, and the humiliation of Pearl Jam.

The following piece presents an incomplete timeline of the sociological production of the end of the pandemic over the last year.

One of the key changes—pun intended—to the pop charts in the last 60 years is the demise of key changes. What happened?

Jews from the Ottoman Empire pioneered the Christmas lights market a century ago — but nativism, antisemitism and islamophobia obscured this history.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins invented the setting that eventually became Wakanda in her science fiction, but her name isn't widely known.