Excerpts

Protecting the food supply chain means protecting workers.

The disease afflicted the author as he was writing what would become "The Innocents Abroad."

More than anything else, the Watsonville Canning strike was a fight against national oppression.

These women came ready to fight.

The 1930s Socialist Party is often seen as a marginal force, but its successes laid the groundwork for the next generation of organizing.

The date of Occupy's strike has ties to the eight-hour day movement, immigrant workers and American anarchism.

In 1865, a failed stockbroker tries to pull off one of the boldest financial schemes in American history: the original big short.

From atomizer crazes to stranded actor troupes to school by phone, daily life during the flu pandemic was a trip.

The benefits that come with serving the country have withered in recent decades.

Native communities’ vulnerability to epidemics is not a historical accident, but a direct result of oppressive policies and ongoing colonialism.

The history of caffeine and capitalism can get surprisingly heated.

The pandemic doesn’t just threaten our loved ones, but knowledge of our past — so Nelson George went and found his.

A history of U.S. health care debates.

The gig economy wasn’t built in a day.

When societies shift their economies to a war footing, it doesn’t just help them survive a crisis—it alters them forever.

Bunk Executive Director Ed Ayers on the importance of teaching students to think for themselves.

From kitsch to cool, ride the waves of undulating popularity of a tropical fashion statement.

The mail delivery agency is supposed to serve the public good — not worry about profit.

Reflecting on the impact of an education in an institution deliberately set up to defy court-ordered desegregation.

Racial injustice is not a regional sickness. It's a national cancer.

She was a high-schooler in Iowa more than 150 years ago.

Long-hidden documents show the school’s blueprint for slowing integration during the civil-rights era.

All of Andrew Carnegie’s arguments were devoted to explaining why inequality ultimately was good: not only for its beneficiaries, but for poor people as well.

A new book looks at the history of the Afro-Latinx radical activist group and how their influence continues to be felt.

Two copies of the first-person account were tucked away, largely untouched until after his death. Now, his family is sharing his story.

It was only in the 20th century that toolboxes became staples in the homes of middle-class men.

Martin Luther King Jr. proposed a fix for America’s poisoned soul: ending the Vietnam War.

How a New York law on “masquerading” passed in the early nineteenth century has been used—and abused—in the decades since.

Now, she's become hashtag shorthand for people who defy social distancing orders.

For one West Virginia community, the acquisition is a missing puzzle piece to questions about slavery in the state.

A brief history of death tolls.

Restrictionists have long sought to cut U.S. immigration — to zero.

What changes each decade, what stays the same, and what do the questions say about American culture and society?

Revisiting the public health lessons learned during the 1918–1919 pandemic and reflecting on their relevance for the present.

One of the world's first mass deportations, bureaucratically managed and large-scale, took place on American soil.

Watching disease spread and kill on slave ships.

In "Race for Profit," Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor walks us through the ways racist housing policy survived the abolition of redlining.

In the 1790s a plague struck the new American nation and killed thousands. Noah Webster told the story of pandemics and invented a field.

Lessons from another time of great disillusionment.

COVID-19 has taught us all just how frayed our social safety net has become, and how its holes make us all more vulnerable.

In addition to COVID-19, another pandemic is preying upon the human spirit, nourished by a vulgar bigotry that has gone viral.

It was 1921, and it changed the character of the United States for decades.

Weariness of strong government is a key American tradition. But equally important is the revolutionary idea that national governance should come from the states.

While worrying about our food supply, we must also worry about workers producing it.

The radical and reactionary currents of New York at the turn of the 20th century.

Coronavirus songwriting has gone as global as the pandemic itself, creating a new genre called pandemic pop. It’s a tradition with a long history.

"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, and avalanches; but he cannot save them from fools—only Uncle Sam can do that."

Reflections on the ahistorical, aristocratic, and romanticist approach to "nature" elevated by John Muir, and by his admirer, Ken Burns.

The diary has been distorted by even her greatest champions. Would history have been better served if it had been destroyed?

Decades after the war, a group of prosecutors and historians discovered the truth about a mysterious SS training camp in occupied Poland.