Excerpts

A new book explores the final days of Ralph Waldo Emerson - traveling from Concord to California, and beyond.

How Oct. 1 came to be celebrated as “Jerry Rescue Day” in abolitionist Syracuse.

The city of Chicago was built upon the settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples and lands. That history of this conflict continues into the present.

An exploration of the potential effects of regional accents on poetry and slant-rhyme.

Through an assault on administrative agencies, the Supreme Court is systematically eroding the legal basis of effective governance.

Thomas Downing was a fine-dining pioneer with a secret.

A new history of the rebels led by Ricardo Flores Magón emphasizes the role of the United States in the effort to take them down.

How David O. Russell’s movie messes around with the story of the Business Plot.

Uncovering the earliest surviving fragment of Black-produced cinema.

The singer wasn't a feminist torchbearer, but her music amplified women's issues.

Calls for control over educators are manufactured political myths as they’ve never had the power to push an agenda.

Tying the fight for equal rights to the founders and the Constitution has worked before.

Centuries of capitalism saw the global countryside ruthlessly converted into cheap commodities. But at what cost?

Native people have lived in the Big Bend region of west Texas for thousands of years. Who should claim their remains?

The consequences of racial separation are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority.

Our food system could have been so different.

A new book provides a framework that engages with “big history” or “deep history” while avoiding explanations that flirt with forms of determinism.

The story of the modern web is often told through the stories of Google, Facebook, Amazon. But eBay was the first conqueror.

President Benjamin Harrison promoted the holiday after a mob killed 11 Italian Americans and set off a diplomatic crisis.

"Slouching Towards Utopia" is a rise-and-fall epic—but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall.

An interactive visualization of the remarkable diversity of African American music, with essays on the characteristics of each genre and style.

A landslide that exposed racial inequalities embedded in Appalachian communities.

An online roundtable on a new biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.

A historian looks at the widespread racism in the American progressive movement of the early 20th century.

An early 20th-century scrapbook put together by Company 62 of the New York City Fire Department.

“The connection between a hot temper and an empty stomach,” explained through a history of colonial interactions with indigenous peoples.

Discussion of the Hart-Cellar Act that was passed 50 years ago.

A new history examines their use in the past and considers their effectiveness for the future.

Service members were attacked, discredited, and shortchanged on GI benefits—with lasting implications.

Treating the practice of land acknowledgment seriously requires more than just getting the names right.

Such a doctrine would be antithetical to the Framers’ intent, and to the text, fundamental design, and architecture of the Constitution.

An enslaved woman’s experience with General Sherman’s army.

In the 1990s, liberal intellectuals complained that evangelicals were moralistic on political questions. Now the complaint is reversed.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown just how hard it is for Americans to grieve.

Anthropologists study the hormones in hair to compare the stress levels of people nearing death today with those who died 100 years ago.

“Very sensible men have declared that they were fully impressed at such a time with the conviction that it was the burning of the world.”

Despite several new lawsuits, investigations, and the bombshell revelations, Trump’s fate will be like that of the former vice president.

Support for Confederate symbols and monuments follows lines of race, religion, and education rather than geography.

Buster Keaton made his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of existence in ways baffling to those among whom he found himself.

Fifty years after his father declared martial law, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was welcomed in New York.

Harm reduction strategies, like those pioneered by queer men of color, have the best chance of stopping this disease.

Examining enslaved mothers and antislavery literature on the eve of war.

Watching the Ken Burns series on the U.S. and the Holocaust and thinking about American folk music.

The modern misunderstanding of the term "people of color" and the racial categories associated.

In the wake of economic crises, liberal democracies proved most adept at imposing austerity.

Shows from "Mr. Belvedere" to "Grace Under Fire" fought ignorance and prejudice with more care and passion than many who had been elected to public office

A commitment to internationalism helped build multi-ethnic campaigns within the more radical and anti-authoritarian side of the US labor movement.

A new history of the Civil War and Reconstruction examines the ways in which Black Americans formed networks of self-reliance in their pursuit of emancipation.

Remember Dan White? He was the Kyle Rittenhouse of his day. No wonder Tucker Carlson loves him.

A look at voter rights through political cartoons.