Excerpts

The author of 'High-Risers' revisits 'Candyman,' in which public housing is the greatest horror of all.

In 1907, a patent application for the pigeon camera was submitted.

The film’s hero left a legacy of racist violence in Texas.

How Harold Washington became Chicago’s first black mayor.

Boston and Providence meet the famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker.

An early nineteenth-century feminist fights back against a narrow view of woman’s place in society.

What haunted America was not the misty specter of revolution but the solidifying specter of reactionary backlash.

Although he 'spoke' German, the vaudevillian canine captured the heart of the nation.

Benjamin Franklin introduced the magical picture, an experiment that played on the king's beloved image and his deadly force.

The history of the black con artist has been forgotten.

The answer was hidden in the shadows.

Rodriguez has captured celebrities in repose and farmworkers on strike.

Hannah Duston was used as a national symbol of innocence, valor, and patriotism to justify westward expansion.

The story of the Bintel Brief, an early twentieth-century advice column for Jewish immigrants.

For millennia, humans have followed specific patterns passed down by their forbears without always knowing why.

Redlining: the racist housing policy from the Jim Crow era that still affects us today.

The era of audience exploitation began in earnest thanks in large part to the experiments of Dr. Frank Stanton in the 1930s.

American niceness is the absolute worst thing to ever happen in human history.

More than 150 years ago, Frederick Law Olmsted changed how Americans think of public space.

The lesser-known beginning of the desegregation of public transportation.

The former Bush mouthpiece had more to do personally with the Iraq WMD catastrophe than he wants us to believe.

How experts and their facts created immigration restriction.

A missionary's account of the atrocities perpetrated against Cherokees shows that the Trail of Tears is no laughing matter.

Suicide during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Military necessity drove political support for a women’s draft.

In 1867, the Fenian Brotherhood was caught running guns to Ireland, precipitating a diplomatic crisis.

Business schools fetishize innovation, but their heroes succeeded due to manipulation of corporate law, not personal brilliance.

His reputation was savaged because he had the temerity to question the 'Good War' narrative.

While a far cry from full emancipation, it was an important step towards the abolition of slavery.

Lies about history long protected lynching.

Far from being a utilitarian afterthought, an astonishing number of design choices go into pagination.

Most of the arguments for preserving our insane system are morally odious, unsubstantiated, and/or factually incorrect.

George W. Bush committed an international crime that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

It offers a narrow vision of the activists who fought for equality.

Between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, about a thousand black southerners sued whites who had wronged them.

T. Thomas Fortune changed Black History, and seems to have been forgotten.

Ignoring the moral imperative of repairing slavery's wounds because it might be “divisive” reinforces a myth of white innocence.

The fear and hysteria that led to Japanese interment during World War II was manufactured for corporate profit.

It was motivated in part by white Southerners' concerns about taxes, but ended up being all about maintaining their political power.

When he promised to put America first in his inaugural speech, Donald Trump drew on a slogan with a long and sinister history.

Fifty years later, Bobby Kennedy’s passionate, inspiring, and tragic presidential campaign still fascinates.

From Mickey to Maus, tracing the evolution of the pictures, panels, and text that brought comic books to life.

Babies have been playing in the political arena for a long time.

American has long been suspicious of “elites”, but just who they are has changed a lot over the last 200 years.

It took more than five decades for advocates of statehood to vanquish white supremacists in Washington.

The rising tie between black activism and pro-Palestinian advocacy.

The Cold War says more about how U.S. elites imagined their “freedom” than it does about enabling other people to be free.

Blaine was never as recognizable as Elvis or Sinatra. Still, he was key to the creation of some of rock n' roll's biggest hits.

A long-overdue excavation of the book that Hitler called his “bible,” and the man who wrote it.