Excerpts

Although originalists fail to see it, abortion has had a long and storied history for American women.

Behind his tough image, the longtime FBI director was a man of profound contradictions.

Born into slavery, then reclaimed by black women, the headwrap is now a celebrated expression of style and identity.

The painter, who died at the age of thirty-one, vivified his Native American heritage with inspirations from modern art.

Several years before the United States officially entered World War II, Black Americans were tracking the international spread of fascism.

Historians should reject nationalism and help readers to avoid its dangers.

What we can learn from fifty years of anti-abortion propaganda.

While the female factory worker is a pop icon now, the “We Can Do It!” poster was unknown to the American public in the 1940s.

Haaland v. Brackeen could have major consequences for tribes’ right to exist as political entities.

Subterranean metaphors have been a powerful tool of political resistance. Today, is there anywhere left to hide?

The concept of "heathenism" may seem outmoded, but it defines race and religion in America.

J.D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" and Steven Stoll's "Ramp Hollow" both remind us that the history of poor and migratory people in Appalachia is a difficult story to tell.

Bounce is defined by its “up-tempo, call-and-response, heavy base, ass-shaking music” and by its transgressively liberatory power.

Two new books and one expanded edition of Gordon Parks' photographs look at the work of the photographer from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

In the 1872 election, Victoria Woodhull ran for president of the United States – the first woman in American history to do so.

The first feature-length zombie movie emerged from Haitians’ longstanding association of the living dead with slavery and exploited labor.

The second section of the Fourteenth Amendment offers severe penalties for menacing the right to vote—if anyone can figure out how to enforce it.

They dominated far longer than they were dominated, and, a new book contends, shaped the United States in profound ways.

Today, it’s still nearly impossible to see the Black people whose presence, tramped down for a century and a half, is why this commemorative landscape exists.

The genre has been disdained by the church and mocked by secular culture. That just reassured practitioners that they were rebels on a righteous path.

America loves a good scoundrel. We should remember this one.

The Mueller report raised the issue the Constitution’s framers feared in 1787: abuse of presidential power.

A new book recovers the many ways Protestant Americans, especially women, communicated with the dead from the 17th century to the rise of séance Spiritualism.

Southern segregation, racism and a militarized police meant the plan was destined to fail.

The traditional wooden barn persists even as family farms have been almost entirely replaced by multinational agribusiness.

The idea of proportionality has roots in midcentury Japanese American advocacy.

For three quarters of a century the South was the geographic base of Democratic Presidential hopes.

Race-based federal lending rules from New Deal programs kept Black families out of suburban neighborhoods, a policy that continues to slow economic mobility.

J. Edgar Hoover saw the political effectiveness of cracking down on elite brothel madams—but not their clients—in New York City.

John Locke took part in administering the slave-owning colonies. Does that make him, and liberalism itself, hypocritical?

Faculty and staff once owned slaves, and professors taught racial eugenics.

The standoff 60 years ago has newfound relevance for handling the Ukraine crisis today.

The masks owned by early American women and even children were no less symbolic than modern masks in terms of practical use, commodification, or controversy.

Six decades ago, leaders in the GOP backed away from the conspiracy theories peddled by the leader of the increasingly influential John Birch Society.

Viewed as public memory, the Crisis has an extraordinarily useful function today: a nuclear warning for the future.

Colorblindness has a long history in college admissions, the Black intellectual tradition, and today’s assault on affirmative action and race-conscious policies.

In trying to understand one of the key aspects of structural racism, have we constructed a new moralistic story that obscures more than it illuminates?

On the occasion of its bicentennial, and in the wake of racist violence in Charlottesville, UVA confronts its history.

A discussion of the patriotic attempt to spurn European fashion and spin cloth at home in the time leading up to the Revolutionary War.

How would the presidency have looked under Joseph Lane, a Democrat, as opposed to Abraham Lincoln?

In the 1740s, Bordeaux developed some of the first modern theories of racial difference, even as the city profited from the slave trade.

In the 1930s, Americans fell in love with Czechoslovakia and Spain; today, it’s Ukraine. What happens when one finds a “second mother country”?

Suffragists coalesced in San Francisco to push for nationwide women' suffrage and send a petition to Congress for the vote.

Telling a spooky story around a campfire—or in a dorm room—may be the best way to keep a local legend alive.

Even at a time of repression, these women found ways to create a culture and life for themselves.

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

The Town of Boston’s invention of the standing committee 250 years ago provided a means for building consensus during America’s nascent independence movement.

Two new books make a devastating case against claims that the Constitution should be interpreted on the basis of its purported “original meaning.”

The late socialist writer's first book was a deep exploration of how the US labor movement became so weakened.

What was ethical consumption under capitalism?