Excerpts

Despite Jeff Sessions’ new mandate along the border, the Justice Department has prioritized immigration offenses for years.

Today, 1 in 3 American babies are delivered via the procedure, twice what the World Health Organization recommends.

Scott W. Stern’s book documents a decades-long program to incarcerate “promiscuous” women.

A new show, featuring the paper cutouts, reveals unheralded early Americans.

Virginia Dare and the myth of American whiteness.

What today's activists can learn from their victories.

The U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, but the fight for religious equality was only just beginning.

An 1866 essay presents Andrew Johnson as "the virtual leader of the Southern reactionary party."

Archaeologists have uncovered the slave quarters of Sally Hemings at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello mansion.

It was a time when promoters were telling women in music: “You can’t put two women on the same bill. People won’t come.”

Mary K. Goddard printed one of the most famous copies of our founding document.

Racial violence destroyed an affluent African-American community, seen as a threat to white-dominated American capitalism.

Out-of-the-can branding helped transform World War II’s rations into a beloved household staple.

By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, did colonial Americans still sound like their British counterparts?

How Americans went from adventurous eaters to plain janes—and then back again.

This negates a commonly used defense that Confederate symbols represent ‘heritage not hate’.

Donald Trump's children aren't the only family members with political power in the Trump administration.

The worldview laid out in the 94-year old law is still the foundational principle of American immigration policy today.

On Memorial Day weekend, we celebrate an icon of vernacular design.

We should take him seriously. Black Americans have been threatened with deportation before and it never ends well.

In researching his family's past, the author learns of his ancestors' efforts to thrive despite the confines of racial oppression.

Leaked documents reveal coordination between big business and law enforcement to break up last year’s protests at Standing Rock.

Today's Christian nationalists and liberal secularists both oversimplify the history of the nation's founding.

Polarization in Congress began in the 1970s, and its only been getting worse since.

Over the years, there have been surprisingly few of them.

The 37th president used methods of media manipulation that Donald Trump can only fantasize about.

If Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan were transported to 2017, they would be shocked that the United States is considering an attack on North Korea.

A new study overturns economic orthodoxy and shows that unions reduce inequality.

The most famous Emancipation holiday is more necessary now than it has ever been.

Black power, and the causes it supports, began long before the official Black Power movement.

The Great Dismal Swamp was once a thriving refuge for runaways.

Columbia professor Richard R. John explains the history of U.S. monopolies and why antimonopoly should not be conflated with antitrust.

Decades of tough-on-crime policies that criminalized the poor and people of color are yet to be undone, but the pendulum is beginning to swing.

How every major industry and marketplace in America came to be controlled by a single, monolithic player.

An interactive depiction of more than a century's worth of foreign travel by U.S. presidents and secretaries of state.

When Democrats claimed the individual mandate, Republicans lost their best idea for health-care reform.

In dismantling Obamacare and slashing Medicaid, Republicans would strike a blow against signature victories for racial equality in America.

The word 'history' evolved from an ancient Greek verb, but its definition has changed over the years

The memorial to the men sat in a field until 2010 when officials took a fork lift to it.

The bill unleashed a poisonous idea: that America had defeated racism.

Prisons today undergo criticism but in the 19th and the 20th century prisons treated their inmates as "slaves of the state.”

In 1935, as lava from Mauna Loa advanced on Hilo, the not-yet-famous Army general was called to the rescue.

How seaside towns throughout the northeast limited the ability of ‘undesirables’ to access public beaches.

The researchers compiling the U.S. Army’s accounts of Iraq and Afghanistan have an unprecedented volume of material to sort.

New labels at the Worcester Art Museum are drawing attention to the connections between art, slavery, and wealth in early America.

James Comey’s testimony joins the pantheon of dramatic congressional moments.

You cannot have reconciliation without empathy. And you can’t have empathy unless people know the past pain that informs our present.

Buying goods in the Old South revealed the fragile politics at the heart of master-slave relation.

An exclusive excerpt from "The One Device" about the engineering fight that created the iPhone as you know it.

A housing policy expert explains how federal government policies created the suburbs and the inner city.