Excerpts

Many people think of the White House as a symbol of democracy, but it also embodies America’s complicated past.

The long history of politicians claiming to be victims of lynching and racial violence.

Christian fundamentalists have become a politically powerful group since the movement’s foundation in 1919.

Historians tell stories about the past. A new book argues that those stories are often dangerously wrong.

How video game designers are 'gaminiscing' World War II stories.

A term that once described a vital tradition within the Christian faith now means something else entirely.

Ninety years ago, young African Americans in the South took up the Lindy Hop. It was an act of resistance and an assertion of freedom.

The Depression was the gravitational pull that created country stars and their nationwide universe of listeners.

Can the social contract be protected from a measles outbreak?

How online fandoms are allowing people to find themselves in the narrative.

Expanding the radical promise of the American Revolution.

Becoming an agency that wouldn't dream of advertising on Breitbart will require deep changes.

Lizabeth Cohen on the poverty and prosperity of the American city.

In the mid-20th century, Playboy wasn't just an erotic magazine. It was an architectural movement as well.

Hundreds of ancient Native American sites along the Gulf Coast are at risk.

“The child is made to study far, far beyond his physical strength.”

Confederate Statues aren't the only reminder of the Civil War - the US Army still has major bases named for Confederate soldiers.

A review of Lewis Hyde’s “A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past.”

Apollo 11, the JPEG, the first pop-up ad, and 33 other bits of software that have transformed our world.

The North Carolina Klan thought burning crosses would scare the Lumbee tribe out of Robeson County. That’s not how things went down.

Soldiers who had fought in Vietnam weren’t pitted against an anti-war movement — in fact, many were actually part of it.

She faced sexism, split with a husband and found her voice teaching law in Houston.

H.W. Brands' new one-volume history of the American West reads too much like a movie we’ve already seen.

Are New Deal-era redlining maps still the best available tools for understanding the racial wealth gap?

It’s time to move past the tech sector’s creator myths.

The question of how to fix the tech industry is now inseparable from the question of how to fix late 20th century capitalism.

Indian boarding schools held Native American youth hostage in exchange for land cessions.

Five years since its inception, a look at what the Black Lives Matter movement accomplished and the important work it left unfinished.

Frank Olson died in 1953, but it took decades for his family to get closer to the truth.

Hundreds of Marines lost their lives in Helmand. Former Marine Christopher Jones returns to see what those losses achieved.

The U.S. had its own anti-car movement, led largely by women, before the Dutch "Stop de kindermoord" movement of the 1970s.

Fox News shields President Trump, but his love for their conspiracies might bring him down.

The investigation brought indictments and convictions — but Reagan weathered the storm.

The 1994 studio film was written by a 20-something who mined her own life to tell the story of a generation that disdained 'selling out.'

In the mid-1990s, Sarah McLachlan set out to prove a woman's place was center stage.

The origins of our efforts to keep foreign countries out of our elections.

To be Gen X was to be disaffected from the consumer norms of the 1980s, but to be pessimistic about any chance for social transformation.

Are whistleblowers heroes or traitors? It depends who you ask.

The making of the black working class.

No belief in the history of the US has been more threatening to democracy than the certainty that only white people are fit for self-government.

It’s doubtful even Alexander Hamilton believed what he was selling in “Federalist No. 68.”

For over 100 years, the bubbly beverage has gone in and out of vogue as a wellness tonic.

The historical context of the amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War, Eric Foner argues, are widely misunderstood.

The novelist drew on far-flung voyages to create his masterpiece. But he could finish it only at his beloved Berkshire farm.

Today, it’s a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments.

A review of two recent books about white paramilitarism in the wake of the Cold War.

Margret and Hans A. Rey, the reluctant parents of a cartoon ape-child, always yearned to leave children’s literature behind.

From the Framers on, Americans have understood our fundamental law to oppose ownership of persons.

A shocking story about the biggest company in the US's most profitable industry.

American revolutionaries had a far wider range of reasons for supporting rebellion than we often assume.