Told

Shelby Foote, failed novelist and closeted member of the Tribe, turned the Civil War into a masterpiece of American literature.

Executives feared their newsreel footage would “cause riots and mass hysteria.”

The founding and funding of conservative media on college campuses in the 1960s.

On Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.”

A new book identifies the 1968 Democratic convention as the moment when broad public regard for the news media gave way to widespread distrust, and American divisiveness took off.

Favorite slur too racist? Replace it.

Were Harriet Boyd and Cora Stewart rivals in Greece in 1897? The fog of war has obscured a groundbreaking tale.

Christopher Nolan's blockbuster has generated a torrent of historical commentary about the birth of nuclear weapons. Is there something missing from the conversation?

How cable TV transformed politics—and how politics transformed cable TV.

Richard Nixon decided a powerful new medium should appeal to the marketplace, not to citizens.

Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident. But writing by hand did not simply continue to “advance” until it inevitably began to erode.

Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 

The photojournalist Bud Lee captured the riots of 1967 and the human cost of the brutal police crackdown.

Meet the feuding twin sisters who popularized the American advice column.

Though technologies have altered information warfare, the underlying principles remain unchanged since the day-to-day operations of the Continental Army.

Despite facing political headwinds and raising 'suspicion' among publishers, 'Reading Rainbow' introduced generations of American kids to books.

Penmanship was once considered a window to the soul. The digital age has closed it.

In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar America.

The internet has expanded how we understand the possibilities of the trans experience.

It was actually from a 1950s antisemitic and white supremacist magazine. Who cares?

The voice of Doctor Johnson, archcritic of the American Revolution, was constantly in mind for the Declaration of Independence’s drafter.

The Civil War general's reputation was shaped by partisan politics, editorial whims and his own personal failings.

How abolitionists viewed the American flag.

The view from nowhere came from somewhere.

“Forced labor” conflates different forms of labor throughout history and minimizes the uniquely brutal conditions of chattel slavery.

In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics.

‘Time’ magazine and the unraveling of the American consensus.

She was a woman, but she was not the author of the speech attributed to her in popular lore.

In the late Sixties, countercultural media was distributed by the Underground Press Syndicate and bankrolled by marijuana.