Excerpts

Remembering the switchboard operator who listened in on Cohn’s calls with Nancy Reagan, Gloria Vanderbilt, Carlo Gambino, and Trump.

In the 1950s, if a woman wanted to know if she was pregnant, she needed to get her urine injected into a frog.

Teddy used nearly 10 times as many executive orders as his predecessor. The repercussions are still felt today.

America's home front was the site of internment, deportation, and vast property seizure.

A new British television series, Jamestown, set off a minor public debate about just how rebellious women could be in the past.

A small act of protest that resulted in significant change.

A documentary attempts to remember forgotten lynching victims.

Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters in the ’60s.

Kanye West won't win Trump black support. But it will cost West his.

Beekeeping, alien planets, and the limits of narrative as technology.

History is coming to life, and scholars are debating the merits of this wave of re-creation and manipulation.

Why did Alexander Hamilton and James Madison take up the cause of the very thing that revolutionaries had vehemently opposed?

The intellectual father of the job guarantee movement saw it as a replacement for the social safety net.

A reflection on Zora Neale Hurston’s newly-published book, "Barracoon."

The iPhone era has ushered in a new fondness for analog photography that has turned clunky cameras into necessary accessories.

How liberals, over decades, worked to undermine a proposal that has long enjoyed public support.

How a conservative agenda and a feminist cause came together to transform criminal justice.

Franklin Roosevelt had his own Breitbart, and radio was his Twitter.

She was an architect of the civil-rights struggle-and the women's movement. Why haven't you heard of her?

Joshua Speed found his BFF in Abraham Lincoln.

Hunger hasn't always always caused anger and violence - in American history, hunger was more likely to be suppressed.

The founder of a popular South Carolina barbecue restaurant was a white supremacist.

Rather than seeking a national solution, activists are taking to states across America to combat the deep roots of poverty.

What's next for Planned Parenthood?

Emma Ray was a leader in battles against poverty, and for temperance.

With rampant talk of Russian interference, it's worth recounting Washington's role in undermining Russia's 1996 election.

Democrats like Lyndon Johnson staunchly supported Israel. Now the party is leaving that legacy behind.

How is it that the era of neoliberalism coincides almost perfectly with the triumphant rise of a discourse of human rights?

Historian Sara Yael Hirschhorn explains what has driven some American Jews to the most contentious real estate on earth.

Two political pioneers staged a "Pantsuit Revolution."

Melissa Gilbert's lost bid for Congress and the forgotten political history of 'Little House on the Prairie.'

From activist and academic roots, a field takes shape.

How a South Asian immigrant became a Wyoming fast-food legend and received American citizenship - twice.

And why would President Trump bother to change the name?

What was J. Robert Oppenheimer doing with a book about science in early America?

To fight back against corporate power, cities have to cooperate, not compete.

The blues is not "slave music," but the music of freed African Americans.

Many of the assumptions that guided America’s march to conflict in 2003 still dominate American foreign policy today.   

On VE Day, we remember black Americans' Double V campaign: victory in Europe against fascism, victory at home against racism.

A first-hand account of how intel gleaned from 'enhanced interrogation' was used to make the case for the 2003 invasion.

The golden age of American politics was illiberal, undemocratic, and bloody.

The problems of presidential gigantism can’t be solved by finding the right giant—the office is dying from its own growth.

"Get Off the Track!" borrowed the melody of a racist hit song and helped give a public voice to the abolitionist movement.

The dictator modeled his racial campaign after another conquest of land and people-America's Manifest Destiny.

We're supposed to celebrate one of the weirdest artifacts of the Cold War.

The two men met at Appomattox. The loser would become a role model, the victor an embarrassment.

Reliving the Sinking of the Lusitania Through the Eyes of a Survivor-My Great-Grandmother

315 years. 20,528 voyages. Millions of lives.

The Library of Congress' new exhibition is "Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom illustration."

Andrew Jackson was the first president to carry a big stick: he beat a would-be assassin with a cane.