Excerpts

How Earhart and other women pilots of her day helped overcome Americans’ skepticism about flight.

On the Loyalists who fled during the Revolutionary War – like Jacob Bailey, who saw freedom from tyranny with the British in Nova Scotia.

An exhibition in Seattle spotlights the Black artists and performers who called Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden home between the 1930s and the 1980s.

On the transformation of Mary Harris into Mother Jones.

The fight over nuclear waste on Yucca Mountain.

U.S. imperialism and private enterprise in the region have created ecological peril.

The Phrygian cap, also known as the liberty cap, emerged as a potent symbol in 18th-century America and France.

The law is routinely blamed for a very real problem it had nothing to do with.

A touristy dive bar, an unfinished liberation movement, and now a visitor center for the National Park Service.

An archaeologist explains why a museum keeps so many bones from the Jones-Miller site, an ice age bison kill on the North American plains.

Union workers in the US weapons industry present a paradox for anti-war labor activists, but a history of “conversion” campaigns offers a route.

A poignant connection between the erosions of landscape and memory at a former Japanese internment camp in California.

Past conservative figures seem moderate by today's standards.

In defense of the furred and the hoofed.

The political upheaval of 1824 changed America. The same could happen in 2024.

An interview with Taylor Brown, author of the novel "Rednecks."

On the town’s history & architecture.

“An Ideal for Living” explores the fascinating backstory of a mini music format.

While the phrase "between a woman and her doctor" has been used to protect abortion access, it also reflects physicians' outsized power.

Brea Baker on Black land ownership, historical injustice, and the hope for Black Americans to own more than one percent of the land.

Alan Taylor’s case for thinking of it as a continental conflict.

The annual rite of passage has always been more about the ambivalence of adults than the amusement of children.

The warnings in Cold War history.

The 1993 “Hold the Line” experiment.

America is suffering from a severe housing shortage. A crucial tool may lie in the Constitution.

Many recoil at the thought of stronger political parties. But revitalized parties could be exactly what our ailing democracy needs.

Frederick Douglass was introduced to the idea of universal human rights after traveling to Ireland and meeting with Irish nationalist leaders.

The end of the big-city columnist.

How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture.

The sport's greatest figures played ball in the Deep South amid the racism and bigotry that would later make Birmingham the center of the civil rights movement.

The history of American Communism shows that dogma and fervor are no substitute for popular support.

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has been quietly rolling back a longstanding consensus over cruel and unusual punishment.

Five decades after the desegregation effort, a civil-rights scholar questions its framing.

How a Hollywood marketing campaign was responsible for the Ten Commandments being displayed in public all across the country.

Naked runners used to disrupt events seemingly all the time. Why’d they stop?

The Scottish-born naturalist’s early years in the United States.

How Black artists made modernism their own.

On the long and continuing struggle of women artists for recognition on their own terms.

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy published an op-ed in The New York Times calling for a ‘Warning Label on Social Media Platforms.'

When it comes to cicadas, the silence of the historical record can be deafening.

Isolation and a heady mix of hormones and fear provide the perfect setting for bloody revenge.

Childhood trauma led Minty Ross (Harriet Tubman) to seek divine intervention.

In the early nineties, the country turned against the establishment and right-wing populists thrived. A new history reassesses their impact.

Who created it? What was it meant for? And how did it come to be what it is today?

The images, diaries, and ephemera in Grand Valley State University’s Civil War and Slavery Collection reveal the cold realities of Abraham Lincoln’s world.

In the wake of the 1964 Harlem riots, June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s plan to redesign the neighborhood suggested new possibilities for urban life.

And neither do white players from the segregation era.

The long arc of racist plunder through local tax codes is shocking—or, well, maybe it’s not, really.

The rise of the right remade the GOP—and fundamentally changed how parties operated in American politics.

A firsthand account of freedom’s earliest celebrations.