Excerpts

The 1776 Declaration was only the first. What we learn from the long history of splinter constitutions, manifestos, and secessions that followed.

The Founding Fathers were more interested in limiting democracy than securing and expanding it.

Democrats don’t think America lives up to liberal democratic ideals. Republicans don’t think Americans need to.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

The leaders of the Revolutionary War — and their vision for the nation — were far from revolutionary.

A Dallas restaurant owner blended tequila, ice and automation. America has been hungover ever since.

Simeon Wade describes visiting Death Valley with Michel Foucault in 1975.

Native Americans' fights for environmental protection should not be seen as battles against progress.

The end of an era.

The two men owned slaves — but at vastly different moments in American history.

The city isn't rushing to put it back up.

Then the factory closed and the union crumbled.

But the Vermont senator’s political revolution depends on white America, too.

The Vermont senator isn’t religious, but a victory in Iowa or New Hampshire would be the first ever for a Jewish presidential candidate.

Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by people on board.

What she doesn't get about race and the Civil War.

We need literature that wrestles with the evils of slavery while confronting its complexity – especially when it’s written for children

A visualization of who came from where, when.

How the entertainer was blacklisted for standing up to the President.

How eugenics shaped America's immigration policy.

President Trump's grandfather made the choice to leave his German family for the U.S. all the way back in 1885.

A strange and bittersweet ballad of kidnapping, stolen identity and unlikely stardom.

America has always discriminated in the name of national security. It’s just gotten better at pretending it’s not.

It used to be that nobody would admit to opposing a nominee for ideological reasons. Should we be happy that illusion is over?

Puerto Ricans were forced to become “Porto Ricans” – adopting Anglo customs while subsidizing American profits.

Barry R. Harwood says of George Hunzinger's work, “No one else was doing this. They didn’t have a name for it yet.”

Remembering how the white working class got left out of the New Left, and why we're all paying for it today.

The cabaret law—and its prejudicial history—is one of the city's darkest secrets.

Elizabeth Hinton discusses how twentieth-century policymakers anticipated the explosion of the prison population.

A review of a handful of new books that embody the new liberal originalism.

A century ago, millions of Americans banded together to reform the KKK, the rest turned a blind eye.

In her newest book, Barbara Ehrenreich attacks the "epidemic" of wellness.

Esquire, 1940: “Salads are really the man’s department... Only a man can make a perfect salad.”

A century ago, these documents were used to reinforce segregation. Today, they’re being used to impose binary identities on transgender people.

In the 1720s, French colonial authorities seized children off the streets of Paris and forced them to settle the New World.

After the drug was dismissed by the pharmaceutical company that developed it, a researcher started experimenting on himself with it. Powerful hallucinations ensued.

It is only recently that domestic abuse was identified as a serious, public social problem.

South Carolina’s Ben Tillman and the 2016 presidential election.

The civil rights activist and her family had to contend with racial discrimination beyond Montgomery.

And how the Rolling Stones, a band in love with black music, helped lead the way to rock’s segregated future.

Like the abolitionists of yesteryear, white Americans who oppose racial oppression deserve to be remembered and emulated.

Stumbling on a forgotten Reconstruction tragedy, in a forgotten corner of Louisiana.

Here's how they were able to do their jobs long before the Internet.

Both the nation and the Church have depended on the energy and expertise of nuns. They’re vanishing. Now what?

Why do people hike?

"None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers."

In Nogales, Arizona, the United States and Mexico agreed to build walls separating their countries.

The Janus decision is a significant setback for democracy. What should public-sector workers do now?

Enslaved wet nurses were a valued purchase in the antebellum South.

The war brought many couples together. It also drove many apart.