Excerpts

The 1881, Henry George’s ”Progress and Poverty” proposed a land value tax — helping to usher in the Progressive Era.

A new book demonstrates that the skills taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance to the defense of democracy.

Edward Wilmot Blyden sorted through competing ideas about the meaning of freedom in 19th-Century Liberia.

Conservatives think we need traditional hierarchies to reverse social decline; But it’s the economic equality created by strong unions that Americans miss.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Freedom House Ambulance Service set the standard for emergency medical care, laying the groundwork for the services available today.

During World War I, the government constructed entire communities for workers and their families, setting new standards for housing and neighborhood planning.

It used to be progressives who distrusted the experts. What happened?

Walt Whitman was a champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag.

Experts dug up 19th century newspaper clips revealing the real birthplace.

In "Memoirs of a Nobody," Henry Boernstein chronicles the militant immigrant organizing that helped keep St. Louis out of the hands of the Confederacy.

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

The nation’s founding myth was based on faith and solidarity – but it also contained the roots of today’s democratic crisis.

RFK’s call for “wellness farms” revives a grim legacy of forced labor, racial injustice, and eugenics disguised as mental health reform.

During the McCarthy era’s darkest days, public lands came under attack. History now repeats itself – and this may be the last chance to defend what’s ours.

Just because it's man-made doesn't mean it's not legitimate.

He challenged the violence of US power, abroad and at home. His radical internationalism, from Congo to Palestine, speaks to our moment.

Franklin Roosevelt warned that even in peacetime, America’s obligations to the world would continue.

Material history, including at places such as Nottoway, has messages for people studying Black history.

In 1986, black workers in apartheid South Africa walked off the job in support of New Jersey unionists; marking a rare moment of international labor solidarity.

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.

R. Crumb’s cartoons plumb the grotesque corners of the American unconscious.

A brief history of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Repelled by American racism, thousands of free people of color bounced between New Orleans and Haiti in the 19th century.

Scott Spillman reviews Seth Rockman’s “Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.”

The Iran-Contra affair exposed how government officials can ignore democratic norms and practices.

The film illustrates the near-impossibility of upward mobility during the segregation era.

Just down the road from Lexington and Concord, American patriots scurried to defend their immigrant neighbors.

Ultimately, only a civic culture alert to and upset by abuses of power can safeguard sound republican government.

During the Cold War, the government relied on universities for research, but also saw scholars as dangerous.

For two centuries, Karl Marx’s thoughts have significantly impacted US politics. In turn, his close study of the US informed the development of his ideas.

Since the earliest days of the Republic, American citizenship has been contested, subject to the anti-democratic impulses of racism, suspicion, and paranoia.

In 1965, the two intellectual giants squared off in a debate at Cambridge. It didn’t go quite as Buckley hoped.

The poignant images, at once banal and intimate, in the Lynch Family Photographs Collection contain mysteries perhaps only the public can solve.

On the robust influence of labor reform and antislavery ideas and movements on each other from the early National period to the Civil War.

On sanitized depictions of the 19th century, comfort shows, and income inequality.

In the 19th century, dyed ostrich feathers were haute couture, adorning the hats and boas of fashionistas on both sides of the Atlantic.

The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping their memories alive.

Dylan C. Penningroth challenges nearly every aspect of our traditional understanding of civil rights history.

Aimee Semple McPherson created a wildly popular personal brand as a preacher—then suddenly disappeared.

On the rise and fall of confession in American Catholicism, and what the demography of today's Catholics says about the future of the faith.

On the Second Red Scare and the lessons that it can provide for us today.

Sensitivity to the influence of BaKongo cosmology on Kongo Christianity can help us better understand the choices made by leaders of the rebellion.

Half a century ago the civil rights movement’s effort to carry the campaign for school desegregation from the South to the urban North ended in failure.

After the Civil War, conservatives used terrorism, cold-blooded murder, and economic coercion to fight the new state constitution in South Carolina.

John Scanlan’s “The Idea of Waste” argues that all civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear.

What the Constitution asks of us.

By assigning personal attributes to birth cohort, generationism tends to undermine personal responsibility.

We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.

His jurisprudence has been overshadowed by that of his showier colleagues but was a model of principled restraint.

The great American writer witnessed the forging of his nation – but Ron Chernow’s portrait cannot see beyond its subject.