A new history of the Cuban missile crisis emphasizes how close the world came to destruction—and how severe a threat the weapons still pose.

One Texas Republican state House member wants to create a “patriotic” education project to celebrate the Lone Star State—and whitewash its ugly past.

The Biden administration is reviving the legal and moral case for slavery reparations.

Their secondhand experience of past horrors can debilitate them.

In celebrating unsung heroes of history, two new movies overly romanticize the past.

After Charlottesville, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wanted to find out how societies face up to their past—and why some fail.

How not to learn about the American past

Three new books show how Northern states betrayed Black people, and why many found Mexico a safer destination.

The inane system our founders developed to choose the president is an anti-democratic remnant of the slavery era that only benefits the GOP.

Christopher Chitty’s “Sexual Hegemony” is a galaxy-brain examination of the ways in which markets and sexuality intersect.

Instead of traveling the same old blind alleys, Senators should ask Trump’s Supreme Court nominee probing questions about American history.

A new biography of Joseph McCarthy does not reckon with the devastating effects of anti-communism.

The Green New Deal wouldn’t require as much effort as World War II, says the linguist in his new book.

How a Republican presidential candidate became a leading critic of empire

In history and pop culture, a wave of revisionism has subtly cleaned up the agency’s image.

Three fascism scholars explain why the term remains taboo in American culture—and how that must change.

From George Washington to Simón Bolívar, magnetic leaders built modern democracies. They also broke them.

The latest season of Leon Neyfakh’s podcast is another forensic dissection of a well-known, but little-understood, part of American history.

The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., has become a flashpoint in today’s reckoning with racist statues.

The ideology of the men who celebrated the United States while fighting for its dissolution is still very much alive.