Excerpts

When the night-club sensation became a Resistance agent, the Nazis never realized what she was hiding in the spotlight.

“I came to the realization that taking to the streets to fight social revolution in this country is like ‘spitting in the wind; it will fly back into your face.”

The Federal Reserve keeps increasing interest rates to try to bring prices down — but that may erase gains by non-White workers.

A history of techno.

When Susan Struck fought being discharged for pregnancy from the US Air Force, it brought the right to choose into a different light.

Making the case for why U.S. history only makes sense when told as a binational story.

The question of whether or not one served, or was willing to serve, or would be willing to serve, goes deeper than name-calling and allegations of draft dodging.

Chin’s killing, 40 years ago, has inspired documentaries, young-adult books, and countless works of scholarship. What do we want from his story, and the people who tell it?

Country music has often stood, as it were, with one foot in and one foot out of the cave.

Recruits learned the arts of infiltration, sabotage, and survival at a hidden base on Santa Catalina Island.

The Combahee River Collective and E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie agree that the wealthy and powerful will hijack activist energies for their own ends.

A new book challenges the dominant narrative that malls are dying.

Sappony tobacco farmers across generations, and across state borders, when North Carolina and Virginia law diverged on tribal recognition, education, and segregation.

It's been a remarkable transformation over 162 years.

How does a plant become a crime?

Malaria — literally, if not scientifically, "bad air" — once claimed Washingtonians by the score. So why did some doctors believe it wasn't real?

Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today's regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.

Hamilton is less a new vision of the past than a translation of the sacred stories of American civil religion into the vernacular.

San Bernardino County may explore seceding from California. Many of the earliest separatists wanted to transform Southern California into a slave state.

History shows that targeted price caps work when accompanied by a public campaign.

In the seven decades since his mysterious death, bluesman Robert Johnson’s legend has grown.

"The blues was born on a riverboat between Louisville and New Albany, along those docks, in the 1890s. I mean, the blues was born nowhere, of course. Or it was born many places."

A personal account of how one young woman travels to South Carolina in search of her family history and freedom narrative.

Louis Moore discusses Bill Bruton and the erasure of his activism towards integration in Major League Baseball.

Philadelphia gave America its flag, along with other enduring icons of nationhood. But for many, the red, white and blue banner embodies a legacy of injustice.

Companies and individuals are considered grandfathered and exempt from new sets of regulations all the time. But the term and the concept dates to a darker era.

Mystery sorrounds the life of alumnus Homer Smith, who spent decades on an international odyssey to find a freedom in a place he could call home.

Accountability is crucial as we remember the individuals and communities harmed by our institutions and call for retroactive justice.

Finding struggle and resilience on a road trip through the birthplace of the blues.

The Atlantic’s editor endorsed Abraham Lincoln for presidency in the 1860 election, correctly predicting it would prove to be “a turning-point in our history.”

Covering the island has been a central concern for The Nation since the beginning—producing scoops, aiding diplomacy, and pushing for a change in policy.

In 1803 one of the largest mass suicides of enslaved people took place when Igbo captives from what is now Nigeria were taken to the Georgia coast.

From the Statehouse to Lucas Oil Stadium, Arab American immigrants have made contributions across Indianapolis, according to IUPUI's Edward Curtis.

The provision, which makes it a felony to talk about abortion online, has been on hold since the Clinton administration. Could it be enforced in the future?

Unearthing the deep roots of racialized voter suppression—and explaining how they shape ballot access today.

How did the controversial term go from middle-school slang to verboten? The answer lies on the other side of the Atlantic.

A pile of mammoth bones offers evidence that people were living in the region as early as 37,000 years ago.

What shark attacks in 1916 could tell us about the midterms in 2022.

The case for making the street more like the pleasure road Frederick Law Olmsted intended.

How “Vaudeville’s worst act” fought for fame and respect on the stage.

American Democratic Socialism has deep roots in the very “American” values it is accused of undermining.

Abortion and "The Scarlet Letter."

Examining the ingredients—time, grain, government regulations—that have made bourbon an enduring national favorite.

Non-meat proteins have a long history – and are looking more like the necessary food of the future.

The religious origins of American liberalism.

“The circulating medium… is abused like all good things, but without it you would not have had your Horace and Virgil.”

How an intense unclassifiable relationship shaped the history of modern thought.

The two prevailing historical visions of Louis Agassiz — one gentle and reverential, the other rigid and bigoted — may simply be two sides of the same coin.

She was Helen Keller before Helen Keller. Then her mentor abandoned their studies.

Long before the gallery she built was famously robbed, Isabella Stewart Gardner was shocking 19th-century society with her disregard for convention.