Excerpts

Russian electoral interference has renewed the temptation for American leaders to do the same.

Whether they delight or disappoint, old books provide touchstones for tracking personal growth.

Rebels in the post-Civil War South perfected the art of excluding voters, but it was yankees in the North who developed the script.

Convinced of rampant bias on the evening news, Paul Simpson founded the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's best work was done in isolation, a long way from Soviet Russia.

Economic rationales for schooling are eroding democracy.

A somewhat neglected vinyl-sided house is now at the center of a literary legacy battle.

Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing.

Instead of trying to eliminate hunger, we continue to talk about personal responsibility.

Five historians weigh in on a new book about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

Getting to know the New York City street mayors of the turn of the century.

How does Hammacher Schlemmer, famous for such eccentric products as the Navigable Water Park, continue to survive in the age of Amazon?

A pardon request for Aaron Dwight Stevens argues that slavery-related crimes are null.

A legal expert offers a First Amendment analysis of the summer’s violent rallies.

The Georgia landmark is a testament to the enduring legacy of white supremacy.

"Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” by Mark Bray, is part history, part how-to.

Why our history educations must be better.

Most early pioneer statues celebrated whites dominating American Indians.

Wildfires in the American West are becoming ever more prevalent and destructive. How did we get to this point?

A critique of a recent open letter by members of the foreign policy intelligentsia.

Competition among media companies is crucial to democracy.

To prevent botulism in tinned goods, scientists and canners worked with the government to protect the public.

A seismic reading of the financial earthquake and its aftershocks, including those that still jolt us today.

The history of the fight for single-payer health care for the elderly and poor should inform today's movement to win for Medicare for All.

Agnes Scott vs. Princeton, GE College Bowl, 1966.

A history of denaturalization in the US.

A listening tour in Mississippi asks flag supporters why they still support a symbol that represents pain, division and difficult history.

It has been a target of vandals ever since it was dedicated.

Trump has echoed the NAFTA policy of his politically upstart forbearers—mostly.

A new book conjures the complexity of the Bay Area and the perils of its immense, uneven wealth.

The story behind the iconic flag.

The FBI storms a suspect's property, guns drawn. The crime? Film piracy.

The corporate radical who organized Visa wants to dis-organize your company.

Seventy-eight years ago, protesters and white supremacists clashed outside of Madison Square Garden.

No American writer has wielded such influence. So why is he so little known today?

Muzzleloaders have evolved into smart-style automatic firearms in just 150 years.

From "real" mermaids in Florida to the world's largest ball of twine, pulling off the highway is more fun than you would think.

"It’s going to change how we think about Texas history and how we think about ourselves and how we built this state."

Griswold v. Connecticut became about privacy; what if it had been about equality?

Now the Janus decision has helped push the National Right to Work Committee and its sister organizations closer to that goal.

Fifty years later, new accounts of its fraught passage reveal the era's real hero—and it isn’t the Supreme Court.

There’s no returning to a golden age of American democracy that never existed.

The beginnings of the end of private life in the late nineteenth century.

Though there are practical obstacles to school integration, it's not an unreachable ideal.

Why an FDR plan from the 1930s is suddenly popular again.

Had British authorities and their soldiers exercised de-escalation tactics, would the United States exist today?

How Charles Murray stopped worrying and learned to love racism.

The right has demonstrated that winning this kind of institutional fight takes years and requires a ruthless disposition.

The conservative conspiracy lit that paved the way for Donald Trump.

A look at the Clinton blunders that continue to damage his party today.