Excerpts

The common picture we get of the US South is one of resolute conservatism. But the region has a radical history, too.

Rather than a “colonial America,” we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial.

Is the working class experiencing a new CIO moment?

Beginning in the 1960s, young Black majorettes and dance troupes created a fascinating culture. This is the story of how they did it.

An admission of wrongdoing from the U.S. government came later, but a Supreme Court ruling had lasting impact.

A missed opportunity for genuine equity.

A virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news, he had a sense of political theatre that helped create a radical new reality.

Railroads—in the Jim Crow South just as in today’s Ukraine—employ physical infrastructure to create racial divisions.

In search of the mythical blues—and their real urban origins.

An excerpt from a new book on the so-called "Jewish Kennedys."

Just before a lynch mob was to face trial in Florida in 1926, a storm hit.

The missile crisis led Cuba’s leaders to distrust their Soviet ally—an attitude that ultimately helped their revolutionary system to outlast the USSR’s.

Saidiya Hartman’s unrelenting exploration of slavery and freedom in the United States first appeared in 1997 and has lost none of its relevance.

A new book documents a period of thriving radical groups and their devastating suppression.

How marketing made guns a fundamental element of contemporary boyhood.

A new documentary explores the origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott — with lessons on how we see movements.

When a university denied its legacy, students and faculty stepped in to do the research.

Conservative Judaism’s origins lie in a donor plan to neutralize and refine the radical Jewish immigrant masses.

Group sues Biden and National Archives over delay of JFK assassination records.

A review of "C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian."

The author confronts the daunting task of writing about her childhood memory, both as a memoirist and a historian.

The Broadway revival of the musical means less to reanimate the nation’s founding than to talk back to it.

One of the earliest uses of intertitles, in this fin-de-siècle accident picture we can observe cinema discovering new forms of communication.

Looking back at the misadventures of mid-century whale cardiology expeditions.

To understand today’s political battles, you need to know how they began.

The promise of US federalism is that states will be “laboratories of democracy." The reality is that states are more often laboratories of authoritarianism.

To what extent did newspapers influence public opinion in the US and Britain before and during World War II?

Forty-one of the 561 enslaved Africans on board the "Guerrero" died when the illegal slave ship sank off the Florida Keys in 1827.

How the defeat of the 1890 Lodge bill presaged today’s age of ballot-driven backlash.

A show at the Jewish Museum surveys three eventful years of art, film, and performance in New York City—and the political upheavals that defined them.

Describing the experiences of radicals who lived in, traveled to, or found themselves in Mexico between 1910 and 1920.

Where did the behind-closed-doors racist garbage from some leading Los Angeles elected officials come from?

Without Murray’s intense commitment to the freedom struggle, the more famous civil rights leaders would not have had the successes they did.

Charles Sherrod wasn’t a big name, but his life has a lot to tell us about the civil rights movement.

Woodrow Wilson’s postmaster put papers out of business and jailed journalists. The tools he used still exist.

The Folkies and WWII, Part Two.

A brief history of the Massachusetts suffrage movement, and it's opposition, told through images of the time.

Explore the lives of people swept up in the great dramas of slavery, war, and emancipation in this updated version of the pioneering digital history project.

Development aid targeted for water as an economic and technical matter had environmental and financial consequences.

Herman Melville likely saw the panorama “Whaling Voyage,” which records the sinking of the whaler Essex, while staying in Boston in 1849.

Discovering the naturalist and artist, and the darker trends within.

Two recent books examine the idea of the Midwest as a haven for white supremacy and patriarchy.

The complex story of wet nurses and their children in the time before the advent of baby formula.

The vintage pair of jeans was pulled from a dusty abandoned mineshaft.

Despite their minority status, the Socialists had been a significant force in American politics before patriotic war hysteria brought on an era of repression.

In Princeville, what’s at stake is not just one town’s survival but a unique window into American history.

For nearly 20 years in the 17th century, Sweden had a little-known colony that spanned parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

A scholar wrestles with the legacy of her grandfather, onetime leader of America’s Communist Party.

American bureaucracy's long and useful history.

Today’s activists should look to North Carolina's black and white tobacco workers, who organized a union and went on strike in the teeth of the Jim Crow South.