Excerpts

We ascribe too much meaning to the early years of the republic.

Take any major American city and you’re likely to find a historically Black neighborhood demolished, or cut off from the rest of the city by a highway.

During the 1860 presidential election, political parties dueled over the intent of the framers.

Novelists concocted elaborate fake histories for mysterious caves in Virginia.

We know why they were built and why they have to come down.

Characterized throughout American history as symbols of crisis, trauma, and grief, these women reject those narratives through world-making of their own.

Historical perspective on school integration.

Questlove’s debut as a director, the documentary "Summer of Soul," revisits a musical event that encapsulated the energies of Harlem in the 1960s.

An architectural historian invites us to sit with her awhile on the American porch.

Dogs were prolific hunters and warm companions for northeastern Native peoples like the Mi'kmaq.

The origins of the Big Apple dance.

The KKK violently resisted the revolutionary gains of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and sought to keep the black masses toiling in submission.

Actions are more persuasive than words, and manipulating morale often dictates how commanders deploy their troops. Witness the American War of Independence.

There have been at least eight provinces in British North America labeled the "fourteenth colony." They cannot all claim the same title.

Elite merchants put up a statue of a British slave trader. A band of protesters toppled it. Who decides what happens now?

The Supreme Court and the pursuit of racial equality.

Long before Trump, politicians on the country’s West Coast mobilized a white working-class base through violent hate of Chinese and Japanese immigrants.

Whether economic times are good or bad, the lament for the old days of factories and mills never changes.

Spencer Ackerman’s new book argues that the forever wars created the conditions for Trump’s rise.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.

One famous image of the president features a body that isn't his.

The ghosts of the uranium boom continue to haunt the land, water and people.

Approaching the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center faces a reckoning.

A government-funded group called the Writers' War Board got writers and illustrators to portray the United States positively—and its enemies as evil.

While they never intended for more than 45 million Americans to have this much debt, policymakers in the 1960s made fateful choices.

Parallels between the American Revolution and the U.S. Capitol riot.

Vaccines against smallpox during the Revolutionary War are one example of how mandates have protected the health of Americans for more than two centuries.

Hell hath no fury like a man with a vaginal douche named after him.

America did exactly what the Kerner Commission on the urban riots of the mid-1960s advised against, and fifty years later reaped the consequences it predicted.

Letting panic about fertility rates drive policy is dangerous.

Pvt. Felix Hall’s killers were never brought to justice.

In a city of ambitious influencers, a shadow cabinet hopes it can summon a new New Deal.

A favorite icon of critical race theory proponents doesn’t say what they want him to say.

With an eye toward U.S. power, Americans spread the sport making its Olympic debut.

The conservative hysteria over critical race theory is a refusal to acknowledge that American schools have always taught a white-centric view of U.S. history.

Conflict between American settlers/revolutionaries and the Cherokee nation erupted in the early years of the Revolution.

Those who claim that vaccine resistance is an expression of liberty are historically illiterate.

How public interest groups inadvertently aided the right’s ascendency.

Banning such teaching isn’t colorblind; it would erase Black people from history and maintain White cultural dominance.

Do we give the activist groups of the 1960s more credit than they deserve?

The late civil-rights leader understood that grassroots organizing was key to delivering political power to Black Americans in the South.

Her memoirs contribute to the inaccurate post-Civil War memory of the Southern plantation.

Dick Gregory was an activist, comedian, and trendsetter for Black vegans.

Leading conservative pundits today are pounding themes that were popular among opponents of Reconstruction.

One of the most audacious examples of product placement at the Olympics was staged by John Carlos and Tommie Smith.

The common denominator? Fear of Black liberation.

The great discoveries of the age captivated Poe’s imagination. He almost always misunderstood them.

An artist-activist catalogues the physical remnants of 'segregation walls,' unassuming bits of racist infrastructure that hide in plain sight in neighborhoods.

We do our children no favors if we only feed them a steady diet of fairy tales that sidestep life’s complexities.

A new history charts the forgotten ways the social politics of the Roosevelt years transformed the United States.