Excerpts

Decades after the segregation battles of his youth, Jerry Jones has modernized the NFL’s revenue model but hasn’t hired a Black head coach.

His experiences with racism and golf, from death threats in Memphis to breaking the sporting color barrier in South Africa.

Since we have new presidential pets, Champ and Major, we take a quick look back at one of the nation’s most famous four-legged White House inhabitants.

Black Germans have used activism and scholarship to shed light on what they describe as Germany’s racist fascination with the American South.

Her death was listed as ‘manic depressive psychosis,’ and it sent five of her six children to orphanages.

Since the 18th century, American politics has functioned via coalitions between competing factions. Can alliances survive today’s partisan climate?

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

In a new land, the ancient past held special meaning.

Nineteenth-century New York City was filled with books, bibliophilia, and marginalia.

A 1918 letter sent a historian diving into the archives to learn more about its author.

Before his abuses of power were exposed, he was celebrated as a scourge of Nazis, Communists, and subversives.

American artists were instrumental in propagating the false narrative of Thanksgiving, a deliberate erasure of violence against Indigenous peoples.

Worker sabotage is a weapon of the weak, but capitalist sabotage causes much greater damage.

What happened in Virginia four months later mattered much more.

Revisiting political assassinations.

With Kanye and Kyrie Irving dominating the news, the connections between victims of white supremacy are more relevant than ever.

The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to rally nearly two dozen agencies together in a streamlined approach to protecting the country. So what the hell happened?

The 1954 Supreme Court ruling was hailed as a victory for desegregation. But protracted white resistance decimated the pipeline of Black principals and teachers.

Social media makes it even easier to sell the aura of success that was pivotal to both companies.

On coaches' unequal treatment of African American college basketball players.

A new book exalts the heyday of music magazines, when electric prose reigned and egos collided.

The banjo did not exist before it was created by the hands of enslaved people in the New World.

The FBI’s successful campaign against white supremacists is also a cautionary tale.

The Police Beat Algorithm’s outputs were not so much predictive of future crime as they were self-fulfilling prophesies.

Solving baseball’s enduring puzzles, to those who could even see them, was its own reward. They changed everything but were never given their due.

With seventeen holdups in the past few months, something had to be done. “We will talk to the mayor and the police commissioner. We need more protection".

The county once championed a divisive, but productive, method of training professionals to deal with diversity.

On traveling through the Jim Crow south as the sole Black athlete on a baseball team.

The author of a book about William Still unearths new details about the leading Black abolitionist—and reflects on his lost legacy.

On inclusion of African American athletes in college sports.

It’s a political movement willing to align with anyone to win.

How being introverted and focused on work helped an athlete navigate a prejudiced sports culture.

A historic victory in the midterm elections will let Democrats repeal the state’s right-to-work laws and return to its labor roots.

Halloween's most iconic candy (and its most polarizing) used to be a year-round snack. Then came the candy corn explosion.

Thomas Jefferson's republican simplicity.

The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism.

Long marginalized and misrepresented in U.S. history, the Wampanoags are bracing for the 400th anniversary of the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621.

The baby stroller is only the most visible symbol of the ethos of consumer capitalism that saturates American pregnancy and parenthood.

Class-obsessed consumers found the cold, hard and highly breakable figurines irresistible

Christmas starts earlier every year — or does it?

The Christian, the athlete, and the activist.

Who designed the first sticker? And does anyone care about it anymore?

The Cromwell twins fled the constrictions of high society for the freedoms of the literary world. Ravenous for greater purpose, the twins then went to war.

The oft forgetten story of fugitive slaves whose escape from bondage found them in the Antebellum South's major cities.

A history of horse racing, it's slang, and handicapping.

Interpreting dreams for fun and profit. The importance of oneiromancy (dream reading) to American betting culture.

The shocking power of immersing oneself in another world was all the buzz once before—about 150 years ago.

“The bearing of this upon social conditions can hardly be overestimated.”

Last Seen is recovering stories of families separated in the domestic slave trade. The following explains how the project engages with these family histories.

A brief discussion of the fierce 19th century debates over beards, and how booming American cities created the perfect climate for all that facial hair to grow.