Excerpts

Over the course of the 20th century, tipping went from rare and reviled to an almost uniquely American custom. We still like to complain about it.

Sixty years ago, the romantic victory of the young Cuban revolutionaries amazed the world—and led to a surreal evening on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Historians need to reclaim money as something to be studied in specific social and political contexts.

The 19th Amendment excluded many women in U.S. colonies, revealing suffrage as gradual, unequal, and shaped by empire and race.

The United States tears families apart—during slavery, the wars against indigenous people, the war on drugs, and, today, at the border.

There were 35 million prisoners of war held during World War II. One soldier's diary full of collages and drawings brings a human dimension to that number.

The real Wild West was as much about legal loopholes and cunning businessmen as it was six-shooters and brazen cowboys.

The English assumed people they colonized would convert to their way of life, including Protestant Christianity, which was reflected in Pocahontas’s portrait.

On where the capitalist system came from, what keeps it alive, and what it would take to bring it down.

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. argued that a triumphal arch would be a “slap in the face” to the Lincoln Memorial and its intended design.

Trump’s bid to strip birthright citizenship from millions is a moral, administrative, and legal catastrophe.

Religious beliefs have driven political change for centuries. The question today is which Christian values will prevail.

Philadelphia’s 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition faced delays, politics, and poor attendance, reflecting tension between progress, exclusion, and identity.

Violent relations between the British and Indigenous tribes promoted unrest in the colonies and laid the groundwork for the American Revolution.

Many Black Americans labor under an enduring myth that the lived experiences of their ancestors are lost to the grinding void of enslavement.

Photographs of a forgotten pastime.

After a startling discovery about the historic conditions of its American Indian Boarding School, one Catholic Sisterhood moved to make reparations.

Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law should be alarmed at what is happening—and prepared to act.

The statue of Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who enslaved at least 200 people, is now on display in DC's Freedom Plaza.

The idea that citizenship extends to everyone born on U.S. soil has precedents stretching back to the Founding.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been the loudest booster of the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. And T.R.’s conservation legacy? Not so much.

Norman Rockwell's family obsession with psychoanalysis.

From our 50th birthday to next year’s 250th, Americans have asked who we are as a nation.

The Trump Administration is using the painting to argue the founders were devout Christians, but historians have doubts about its accuracy.

Texas Democrats can win by reviving the state's forgotten populist tradition of labor activism and working-class politics.

Relatives of voting-rights activists warn that the recent Callais v. Louisiana decision risks undoing hard-fought civil-rights victories.

The American Revolution was linked to a surge of working-class political activity on both sides of the Atlantic.

When Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, the spirit of socialism showed up in everything from snowplows to poetry.

The explorers’ crossing of the continent is America’s most famous camping trip. What was it all for?

A new book explains how the US came to rely on economic warfare, but stops short of a complete assessment of its devastating consequences.

During the latter half of the 20th-Century, left-wing extremists influenced by Marxist ideology and antisemitism led a campaign of terror.

Brian Wilson’s “pocket symphony” transformed pop into art, capturing youth, innocence, longing, and loss in the timeless masterpiece Pet Sounds.

The genre of Bob Seger and John Mellencamp reached across the ideological spectrum in a way that seems unimaginable today.

Inside the Trump administration’s high-stakes fight over the island’s strategic minerals.

Compromise that betrays values alienates all sides.

For centuries, the Catholic Church condoned and even encouraged slavery. Even as the practice began to fade, the Church never truly reckoned with its dark past.

What can explain The Story of Ferdinand’s remarkable appeal in its own moment—and its enduring popularity today?

City streets were a theater for much of the turn-of-the-century Progressive Era’s moral dramas about urban life.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais deals a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, using reasoning that Congress rejected more than 40 years ago.

How America celebrated its 100th birthday.

H.W. Brands on the early career of our first president.

By invoking the American Revolution, 20th-century anticolonial figures connected their project with the movement for civil rights in the United States.

Historians must not cede the study of how Americans understand their cacophonous nation to advocates of “patriotic” history.

In her new novel, Karen Tei Yamashita challenges readers to join her in deciphering a shameful moment from the nation’s past.

Perhaps thinking transhistorically might illuminate the way anti-Southerness as antiBlackness obscures the economic lens and hinders labor organizing strategy.

The historical anti-Black crusade of law enforcement and the white cultural establishment.

The supercharged bad faith of “constitutional originalism” threatens everything we hold dear.

Grief can narrow a life—or deepen moral resolve.

A new exhibition makes George Washington seem like anything but a saint. That’s a good thing.

Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, took his sermons very, very seriously.