Excerpts

Coleman’s approach to improvisation shook twentieth-century jazz. It was a revolutionary idea that sounded like a folk song.

Because cycling was an important mode of transportation for agricultural workers and a popular competitive sport, police saw it as a way to target immigrants.

The legislature established a committee last year to “promote patriotic education.” Drafts of one of its pamphlets reveal an effort to sanitize history.

Three veterans of the civil rights movement fought segregation in St. Augustine, Fla., enduring violence and racism in America’s oldest city.

In 19th-century New England, rule-breaking Yankees were a source of national pride.

The historical narrative surrounding the wartime confinement of ethnic Japanese in the United States grows ever more complex.

“They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.”

Felix Frankfurter warned that politicians, not the courts, should make policy.

The "Pleasure Gardens" of the 18th Century captivated the public with a heady mix of fantasy and vice.

How a re-creation of its most famous battle helped erase the meaning of the Civil War.

How America’s infatuation with World War II has eroded our conscience.

Venture into the Montana eatery, once a gambling den and opium repository, that still draws a crowd.

The sweet-yet-somber treat was the star of extravagant 19th-century funeral feasts.

Housing costs are skyrocketing. History offers a path forward.

An eight-year campaign to slash the agency’s budget has left it understaffed and hamstrung. That's good news for corporations and the wealthy.

Our racial history is complex and important, but debates today are eliding entire chapters of it.

Civic-minded Midwesterners realized that network access would someday be a necessity, and worked to make it available to everyone, no strings attached.

Zoar's citizens left religious persecution in Germany and created a utopian community on the Erie Canal.

Conservatives dream of returning to a world where private charity fulfilled all public needs. But that world never existed, and we're better for it.

The new Army bra is the latest chapter in a longtime partnership.

An essay by the president of the American Historical Association generated a firestorm of criticism — but got some things right.

Was coining a heinous offense that underminined public trust in currency, or a creative solution to the shortage of specie across the Atlantic world?

Public heath and race at the US-Mexico border.

The sinister history of fumigating “foreign” books.

The once-glamorous casinos and hotels have become a gilded ghost town.

To understand why evangelicals vote Republican, we shouldn’t focus just on Falwell; we need to look at a century or more of evangelical political culture.

Ambrose Bierce deviated from the refined eeriness of English-style ghost stories for his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation.

Before the establishment of the modern FDA, anti-regulation attitudes ruled the world of food.

In response to the build-up of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba, JFK ordered a quarantine of the island and military surveillance missions.

Beyond “Hamilton”: How the friends turned into political rivals, and finally into mortal enemies.

An Iraqi soldier recalls fleeing through hell at the end of the first gulf war.

The annual worker’s holiday in the rest of the world is May Day. Why not here?

If you think that the banjo can teach us nothing about American history, Southern culture and modern race relations, then you certainly don't know the banjo.

A new history shows how neoliberalism took power during a period of crisis, which leaves open the question of whether it can be forced out as a result of one.

Solidarity between men and women workers is crucial to advancing the cause of workers in America.

"A People’s History" is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.

In the 19th century, puddings were as popular and widespread as pasta dishes are today.

The famous historian was also an antiwar activist who went to North Vietnam in 1968 to accompany three captured US pilots back home.

A bracing and eccentric epic of espionage and hippos.

In 2018, Gerber selected baby Lucas as the winner of its Spokesbaby Contest, making Lucas the first Gerber baby with Down syndrome.

'Nothing is more dramatic than having the College Board launch an AP course in a field,' says Henry Louis Gates Jr., who helped develop the curriculum.

Amid the global threats posed by climate change, energy costs, unemployment and inequality, the need to rethink progress is now an urgent priority.

A look in on the first evolution trial.

In both versions of this question, the assumption is that there’s a pure history out there somewhere, perhaps with answers in the appendix.

A lively defense of narrative history and the lived experience that informs historical writing.

The partisan redistricting tactics of cracking and packing aren’t merely flaws in the system—they are the system.

On the alarming origins of the current political moment.

The most vitriolic and morally panicked conservative figures of the 1990s contributed just as much to modern American conservatism as Ronald Reagan did.

When my father moved to Taiwan, a fax machine and a shared love of music bridged an ocean.

Most of these tools are based on the Consumer Price Index, a measure of changing prices in the U.S. over time