Excerpts

On the early years of America's chronicler of the Great Plains.

Why do they exist? Where did they come from? Can they be defended? The most pressing questions, answered.

The Icarians thought they could build a paradise, but their project was marked by failure almost from the start.

A photographer excavates personal history through reconstruction of Adams's World War II photographs of Japanese Americans.

When we try to recover the “original meaning” of constitutional amendments, we begin with deeply engrained premises about the nature of what we're looking for.

When Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, her views on abortion became a source of intense speculation.

Did you drink the Kool-Aid? The phrase has become such a part of the vocabulary that for many its origins have been obscured.

A chilling raw feed of an infamous event. 

When women are missing from the history we tell, sometimes it’s because of how their stories were preserved and told in the past.

The Pennsylvanian was one of America’s greatest heroes. Why hasn’t he gotten his due?

In the 1950's, Rep. Douglas Stringfellow was a promising young congressman with an incredible World War II story. Then the truth came out.

Was the country’s turn toward free-market fundamentalism driven by race, class, or something else? Yes.

One of the biggest challenges for the NYPD, especially in the years following the turn of the twentieth century, was policing the newcomer immigrants.

The primary sources on Kissinger’s controversial legacy.

The transformation of the environmental movement.

The Instagram feed where friends and family post tributes to loved ones who died of Aids-related illnesses has become an extraordinary compendium of lost lives.

The explorer John Wesley Powell tried to prevent the overdevelopment of the West.

Jeremy Workman and Robert Lyons’s film reconstructs the passage of a 1970 law that made the state a sanctuary for people seeking abortions.

A historian of the Middle East examines how connections have shifted since long before the 1948 founding of the Jewish state.

A Cambodian scholar who fled the Khmer Rouge as a child writes about the legacy of Henry Kissinger, who died at the age of 100 on Nov 28, 2023.

In a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and newsrooms.

How American Girl transformed the doll world—and why millennials love it so.

He was the only person ever to be national security adviser and secretary of state at the same time. He was also the target of relentless critics.

The internet has expanded how we understand the possibilities of the trans experience.

In a recent Supreme Court oral argument about disarming domestic abusers, originalism itself was put to the test.

For decades, Kissinger kept the great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward.

A new film finally spotlights Bayard Rustin, the gay civil rights activist who organized the 1963 March on Washington.

The strange and contradicting development of the liberal version of egalitarianism.

How corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.

As the United States prepared to enter World War I, the government created the first modern state propaganda office, the Committee on Public Information.

Modern surveillance policing is rooted in approaches adopted a century ago.

In every generation, writers and readers find new ways to plumb the depths of Herman Melville and his work.

Sanitation reformers confront a neighborhood seemingly immune to state intervention.

Until about 100 years ago, grasses up to two feet high blanketed swaths of the Sonoran Desert.

The history of garbage dumps is the history of America.

Reenactments of the frontier west, complete with cowboy shootouts on main streets, reproduce a narrative of history that is widely accepted by millions.

Understanding history can help us understand what will be necessary if we’re serious about finally having a more diverse, less exclusionary publishing industry.

A discussion on the difficulty of keeping faith in a foundationally anti-Black republic.

The back-and-forth life of Confederate James Longstreet.

Natchez, Miss., is beginning to highlight the history of its enslaved people—including at a Black-owned bed and breakfast in former slave quarters.

Asbestos was a miracle material, virtually impervious to fire. But as we fixed city fires in other ways, we came to learn about its horrific downsides.

The radical art of the Depression years.

Wherever we find the state engaged in potentially lethal repression, we find prison.

James Monroe’s 1817 goodwill tour kicked off a decade of party-less government – but he couldn’t stop the nation from dividing again.

Carl Skoglund's early life as a militant worker in Sweden prepared him for leadership in the 1934 Teamster Strikes.

The woman with the pen name Onoto Watanna had a stunningly productive literary career as a cookbook writer, novelist, and screenwriter.

The U.S. divided into Pacific, Atlantic, Interior and Confederate States.

A survey of the New Orleans paper from 1837 to 1914 shows reporters and editors frequent used the racial slur to trivialize Black people in news and commentary.

When George Horace Lorimer took over as editor of the Saturday Evening Post, America was a patchwork of communities. There was no sense of nation or unity.

In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England Puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board.