The world of American art collecting was transformed by the unlikely partnership of the Boston Brahmin Isabella Stewart Gardner and the ambitious Russian Jewish immigrant Bernhard Berenson.
The community of descendants of the Sand Creek Massacre maintain rituals of healing that honor the dead while affirming bonds of community that have been tested by a long history of dispossession and the recent trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"If universities behaving more like businesses is the future, we must then aim to imitate sustainable businesses which understand and utilize their unique advantages."
"When family members were asked for DNA samples and learned that long-lost loved ones might be coming home, they began to disclose to reporters aspects of the war’s legacy that had remained outside the glare of large public memorials and celebrations."
"Conservative parents and pundits want to prevent white students from being exposed to the messiness and inequities of America’s past. What will it mean if they succeed in doing so?"
Most Americans recognize the lessons of worldwide crises in climate, migration and health: a system of nearly 200 nations guarding their own interests is not going to solve humanity's biggest problems.
The political field is tilted against the Democrats for the midterms and 2024; will the party embrace the energy of progressives and mobilize its voters the way that conservatives are successfully doing on the other side?
It is impossible not to compare today’s billionaire space race to the iconic celestial competition of the 1960’s. But what if neither is worthy of adulation?
The Supreme Court's oral arguments in a challenge to New York State's gun laws suggest the court is willing to defy precedent and history and assume a power that the Constitution reserves to the people and states, forcing all communities to accept the concealed carrying of firearms.
"A trial by ordeal was not about miracles or superstition. It was, in effect, about the community making a decision on the innocence or guilt of the party, and then bringing it about." Kyle Rittenhouse's trial prompts an uncomfortable reckoning with the continuity of some medieval practices of justice.
The three men on trial for killing Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia are counting on a jury to accept their claim that they were executing a citizen's arrest on Arbery. Georgia's citizen's arrest law, since repealed, shares in the racist history of similar laws across the nation.
The Harlem rebellion against the NYPD in July 1964 was sparked by a police killing of a teenager (and a grand jury's refusal to indict him), but reflected the role of the police in maintaining a profoundly unequal social order that affected everyday life in Black neighborhoods, a situation that has changed little.
Conservative evangelicals rode the abortion issue to a place of power in the Republican coalition. Will their success help or harm the party now that abortion rights are more imperiled than at any time since 1973?
History looms large in arguments about the Constitution these days. But there are widespread misunderstandings of what history tells us about presidential powers, from making war to being impeached.
Upstate New York was once the most pro-Lincoln and anti-slavery part of the Union. The growing presence of Confederate symbols there insults the region's history and contributions paid in blood for freedom.
The self-interest of politicians and defense contractors, not popular demand or military necessity, is driving a new US military buildup that continues unabated even as other vital national priorities go begging.
Since George Washington, the President has had principal influence in government policy toward Native American nations. The nation's record is not generally a proud one but some presidents have dealt more honorably than others.
We need the expertise of scientists and technologists to solve big problems, but we need artists to make people care enough about those problems to demand solutions.
The filibuster, as currently constructed, violates what West Virginia founder Waitman Willey described as “the great fundamental political right of the majority to rule.” West Virginia’s quest to improve their democracy offers lessons on how to heal our own.
