Excerpts

In the mid-19th century, a pro-slavery minority used violence to stifle a growing anti-slavery majority, spurring their opposition to respond in kind.

Her private writing offers another, more idiosyncratic angle to understand the famed poet.

In a forbidding Wyoming desert, scientists and fortune hunters search for the surprisingly intact remains of horses and other creatures that lived long ago.

'Pet of the Petticoats' extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres.

Adelaide Hawkins was on the forefront of an American experiment that would later be called central intelligence.

When cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th century, cowboys formed fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range.

Swampland communities established by self-liberated slaves in Louisiana offer a model to cope with climate disruption.

Evangelicalism and the more liberal “mainline” Protestantism must be understood in a dialectical relationship to one another, rather than in isolation.

On the legal challenges to racist presidential policy that led to the Trail of Tears.

The Embarcadero Freeway and the Berlin Wall exemplified how the politics of mobility reflected the arrangements of power in each society.

How our inability to change America’s most important document is deforming our politics and government.

The story of Kate and Margaret Fox, the small-town girls who triggered the 19th century movement known as Spiritualism.

Over the last half-century, economics has infiltrated parts of the federal government where it has no business intruding.

Inside the strife set off by an essay from the president of the American Historical Association.

Inflation hawks and inflation doves alike have learned the wrong lessons from the monetary policies of Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan.

How best to tell the story of oppressed peoples? By chronicling the hardships they’ve faced? Or by highlighting their triumphs over adversity?

Why the history of science is of use to not only the sciences, but all branches of scholarship.

Deferrals for gay men who wish to donate blood are outdated, stigmatizing, unnecessary, and need to be removed.

He sold 60 million books and 100 million records. Then he disappeared.

In the late 1970s, smaller 'Star Wars' action figures took over.

On the persistent myth of the colorblind Constitution that the Supreme Court's conservatives have embraced.

Politicians across the political spectrum warn of a return to the decade of stagflation, urban decay, and labor mutiny; but their solution misses the mark.

It's a tale thousands of years in the making.

Celtic rituals, tricks of nature, and deals with the devil have all played a part in creating this iconic symbol of Halloween.

A new book details the tangled tale of "Ulitsa Sezam," a "Sesame Street" spinoff that aired until visions of Russia's democratic future faltered.

Like so many other reluctant revolutionaries in New York, he seemed the antithesis of the rabble in arms that the British identified with the mobocracy.

The personal essay is the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

Two genetic studies show how the first Native Americans spread through their new continent with incredible speed.

Either way, Rod Serling definitely pissed him off.

Jerry Lee Lewis was known as the Killer, and it wasn’t a casual sobriquet.

Felix Frankfurter was renowned as a liberal lawyer and advocate. Why did he turn out to be such a conservative Supreme Court justice?

The death of Elma Sands and the Manhattan Company.

The outlines of “salvation antiquarianism”—with the emphasis on “saving”—appears particularly clearly in the AAS’s inaugural 1813 address.

Ballot initiatives, referendums, and other forms of direct democracy have a mixed track record of empowering the people.

During the Civil War, the Lincoln administration demonstrated that a progressive agenda and effective anti-inflationary measures could overlap.

The carefully-tended longleaf pine forests of North America were plundered by European colonizers. They're still recovering.

The conservative successes of the Eisenhower administration have been too quickly forgotten.

Thanks to a collector, thousands of lobby cards from the silent film era will soon be digitized.

The Pentagon's official history says that a heavy bombardment by B-52s in 1972 pushed the North Vietnamese to return to negotiated peace. What are the facts?

A new book offers a picture of an early Internet defined by community, experimentation, and lack of privacy. 

The bank’s history highlights flaws in using public-private partnerships to address racial inequality.

On “all wars” memorials.

How new arrivals remade the east San Gabriel Valley — and assimilated in it.

Despite the prevalence of tricks and spooky spirits in earlier years, the American commercial holiday didn’t develop until the middle of the twentieth century.

Are alarmist narratives about a “new civil war” obscuring the real battle in US politics: the fight for democracy?

When a climate of fear exists, people don’t scrutinize the evidence behind claims about children’s reading material.

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.

The famous historian makes the claim that the demigods of American historical mythology can help us carve paths through our forbidding 21st-century wilderness.

Today’s creepy clowns are not a divergence from tradition, but a return to it.

The Supreme Court considers new arguments challenging admissions practices that colleges use to select a diverse student body.