Excerpts

Centuries before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women crossed oceans and deserts to build communities whose legacies still shape the United States.

The American soccer story can’t be told without deep immigrant roots, political influence, and the drive to achieve.

On the US-backed coups d'état in South America.

The hardest work of leadership comes after victory.

As the United States marks 250 years, an older Indigenous system of women-led governance offers a radically different blueprint for power and responsibility.

RFK’s MAHA spectacle offers an object lesson in how the left cedes fertile political territory.

In 1984, a white man named Bernie Goetz shot four unarmed black youths on a New York City subway train.

The story of Reno, a thriving Black DC neighborhood erased by local elites — and Frederick Law Olmstead‘s son.

Is it too late for our republic to learn from Gibbon’s epic history of Rome’s collapse?

On America’s 250th anniversary, Ms.’ "Founding Feminists" series centers the women whose words, labor and resistance built—and keep rebuilding—democracy.

Never has Donald Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran.

A statue of Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who enslaved over 200 people, was taken down in Delaware, during 2020 protests.

'One Battle After Another' brings the immigration debate to the big screen. It isn't the first.

In the wake of the Cold War, some Soviet bloc spies decided their fake American lives weren’t so bad.

In the 1970s and 1980s, battles to preserve Mono Lake set new protection precedents.

How the British occupation of Boston shaped our political sensibility.

How did George Washington, one of America’s elite 1%, become its leading revolutionary? His evolution came in stages.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. The 200th wasn’t exactly smooth sailing.

How Arturo Schomburg imagined a Black history beyond the United States.

Our history too often sidesteps the question of finances. But sonorous ideals don’t keep an army supplied with uniforms, guns, and grub.

The long, complex interplay between taxation and citizenship.

In the 1970s, sensors and computers turned the US–Mexico border into a testing ground for automated control.

In modern US history, there has never been an attack on free expression quite like Donald Trump’s.

In less than a decade, betting apps swallowed sports. And now they’re doing the same to the news.

Reading Mary McCarthy on Vietnam in a new era of wartime illusions.

Oil shortages forced Americans to rethink consumption and set in motion decisions that continue to shape energy policy today.

"Once a mask is involved, people understand it as a sign of weakness. That the government has something to hide."

Conservatism was a distinct ideology but it is dead and it is not coming back.

Fans and pundits have frequently wrapped Zohran Mamdani in Fiorello La Guardia’s mythic mantle—even when the comparison seems naïve or premature.

What is the 2001 AUMF and what does it have to do with 9/11?

What lessons can we take from Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War?

When cryptid research turns personal.

Memorializing Benjamin Franklin Randolph and the Reconstruction generation.

Throughout these puzzling times, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered.

A new book chronicles the tense negotiations that secured the return of nearly 3,000 Allied civilians held by the Japanese during World War II.

Over two decades later, the Iraq War appears driven less by oil and more by U.S. ambitions to project geopolitical power in the Middle East.

How oil, US power, and regional rivalries have shaped decades of conflict in the Middle East — and why the confrontation with Iran fits a long imperial pattern.

How generations in America have made Jewish identity more complicated.

Professionals processing a profoundly personal loss.

Have you heard the story about a Christian abolitionist “de-arresting” someone?

A review of the fifth episode of Ken Burns’s American Revolution series.

Process over perfection.

George Templeton Strong’s Civil War diaries are a sobering object lesson for today’s reader.

Past conflicts eroded Congress’s ability to decide when to go to war. Donald Trump’s attack on Iran destroyed it.

How car-centric urbanism eclipsed the utopian transportation visions that once shaped urban imagination.

Finding shades of Elon Musk in Upton Sinclair’s 1937 novel about Henry Ford.

The city’s all-out rebellion against ICE builds on more than a century of labor and social justice organizing, explains archivist Isaac Silver.

How a deadly collaboration between the Argentine dictatorship and the Ford Motor Company stifled worker dissent.

The story of Jasveen Sangha, facing sentencing for supplying the dose that killed Matthew Perry, echoes another — the tragic case of the heiress Marcia Moore.

Who gets to decide what the Constitution really means?