Excerpts

The Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling on birthright citizenship is just one battle in the right's larger war on the Second Founding.

Their wealthy successors are still waging class war.

America’s centennial in 1876 was celebrated with a grand exhibition that projected an image of unity and inventiveness in the wake of civil war and recession.

250th-anniversary merchandise has surged, with an expanding range of commemorative items from novelty souvenirs to widespread retail offerings.

A new mixtape from Anthony Johnson and Quintin Smalls talks about Native Islanders’ hopes, fears and frustrations.

Kalanag and the magic of instantaneity.

Early Supreme Court justices were openly political, shaping laws and campaigns, with Dred Scott revealing the Court's limited authority.

Alongside the Enlightenment reason we associate with the founding there were mystics, occultists, and conspiracy theorists.

What Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution meant to America’s revolutionaries.

A new movie relies on 19th century myths to portray the very British George Washington as a moralistic proto-American ready to pursue independence. 

The Declaration has always been fought over. We can let Trump claim it, or we can take up its battle cry to “alter or to abolish” what’s destroying our country.

Thomas Jefferson's declaration might be the most famous, but it wasn't the first.

Black radicals read the Declaration of Independence.

The 1826 Fourth of July marked America's 50th anniversary with nationwide celebrations, patriotic art, and reflection amid growing national tensions.

What are the most important insights historians have offered about the American Revolution in the decades since the Bicentennial?

John Adams’ maneuvering at the Continental Congress brought the independence debate to a head 250 years ago this week.

How rivers reshape our history as they do our landscapes.

In the American Philippines, officials used vagrancy laws to police same-sex relations while avoiding explicit bans.

Even after the fighting started, it took years before American Patriots started calling their cause a “revolution.”

Literature and history, fathers and sons, writers and readers.

Samuel Adams sets his sights on Tory lackeys.

The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson was not then credited with its authorship.

The United States’ founding moment from Washington Crossing the Delaware to the paintings of Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and Kent Monkman.

The conflict divided the six tribes of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, most of whom decided to join the British. The former allies clashed in 1777.

Matthias Aspden was a wealthy Philadelphia businessman who remained faithful to Britain. As a result, he lost his home, property and sense of belonging.

Sports, science, and collective delusion.

Many founders died in despair about the American experiment.

The famed science fiction writer was wrong about world government, but pretty close on robots.

The effects of the racist federal policy, called redlining, shapes Tacoma neighborhoods decades later.

Commemorating the anniversary of the last detachment of Cherokees that arrived in current-day Oklahoma.

Dunmore’s Proclamation was an information document, capitalizing on the institution of slavery, designed to influence the population.

How did we forget the man who coined ‘We the People’?

The Founders' ideas of where law comes from, and who does and does not have the authority to make it, can guide us today as our grievances parallel theirs.

How a printer's risky defiance of a colonial governor, and his attorney's creative defense, laid the foundation for the US's commitment to freedom of the press.

As my community modernized, we used Pennsylvania Dutch less and less. Now I'm trying to preserve it.

The history of refugee protections during America's restrictionist era challenges common comparisons to modern immigration policy.

The rousing urgency of the song seems to possess a power that, according to its own lyrics, “transfigures you and me.”

Custer’s last stand was 150 years ago. As America wrestles with its 250th birthday, this commemoration also cuts to the heart of who we are.

Today's alliance between capitalists, the state, and fascist movements, mobilized against immigrants and workers' movements, echoes the 1910s.

Conservative influencers are pushing for a return to the dark days of 1950s inquisitions.

Historians today may have varying interpretations of what caused the Revolution, just as their predecessors did a century ago.

The cultural lessons at the heart of Custer's failure.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was ideologically flexible but devoted servant of the powerful and a leading organizer of the war on US workers.

For Haywood, a truly radical working-class politics in the United States also required a program of self-determination.

Sex-specific physical education granted women rare authority over their bodies, but also promoted a narrow biological model of womanhood.

How financialization remade corporate America and Wall Street.

Amid the fraud and flimflam of early drug markets, Shakers stood for purity, creating a brand others were eager to exploit.

In the decades following the American Revolution, it was American Protestantism that was most important in shaping the development of American nationalism.

With the fluctuating popularity of suburbia in the latter half of the 20th-Century, the Catholic Church had to constantly adapt.

Picking Silicon Valley’s future winners is still, some six decades since the birth of modern venture capital, more art than science.