A new book on Spanish history includes an examination of the influence of colonialism and conservative Catholicism on the authoritarian worldview and political ruthlessness of Francisco Franco.
Although it's difficult to separate fact from fiction around his life, the famed railroad engineer had something in common with today's rail workers: being stretched to the limits of health and safety by companies' pursuit of profit.
Dismissed, derided, or even deplored by critics, and out of step with the trends, arena rock acts still pack them in in much of America. Is it the sonic key to understanding Trumpism?
Many economic histories portray the American prosperity of the century between the Civil War and the 1970s as the picking of low-hanging fruit. But the story of entrepreneurial innovation during that time is more complicated, and more relevant to the present, than we think.
This moment of peril for American democracy calls for a return to the diagnosis presented in "The Authoritarian Personality," 1950s effort to develop a social-psychological profile of the people likely to embrace fascism.
The combination of post-Soviet hardship, resurgent nationalism, and the destructiveness of the Ukraine war have led many Americans to embrace Russians' dim view of Mikhail Gorbachev. A historian of Russia says the leader had his faults, but his furtherance of humane values has been underrated.
Although historians are trained to think of the past in particular and disciplined ways, understanding how people en masse understand the past is also vital because these understandings—inaccurate as they often are—are vital and embody important information about their hopes and fears.
The story of the car—a story of genius and folly in equal measure—is the story of the making of the modern world. A new book weaves the threads of the automobile's influence through landscape, war and peace, mass production and individualism, and the environment.
The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) called out American health disparities, police abuse and crackdowns on protesters as key failures of the United States to address racial inequality.
Historians who have conducted research in classified materials understand how seriously governments take secrecy and how secrecy can conceal malfeasance or anti-democratic action.
Invoking Chamberlain and appeasement is never a particularly useful response to an international crisis. Do the efforts, albeit unsuccessful, of a small group of British diplomatic outsiders to "civilize" leading Nazis, point in a better direction?
This Labor Day, we’re hopeful about the renewed energy and excitement for workplace organizing—especially by women workers—and cautiously optimistic that today’s workers may overcome the sorts of corporate tactics that blocked organizing in the 1970s.
For me, the son of a cantor and WWII veteran, who grew up seeing numbers tattooed on numerous arms, sharing Salomon Kool's story has reminded me of a collective mission to always remember.
Wilma Soss defied norms as a woman who became independently wealthy through her PR agency and her investments, but the circumstances of her marriage and her outspoken advocacy for shareholders against corporate waste led to her erasure. Her biographers hope to correct that.
With the lapsing of pandemic support for expanded school lunches, the nation returns to its historical roots of stigma and stinginess around the feeding of children.
Both triumphalist and revisionist histories of America's westward expansion emphasize violence, and disagree about whether to understand it with pride or guilt. But what can we make of the moments where understanding and accommodation temporarily prevailed?
Chicano Moratorium commemorations continue today in communities in and out of East Los Angeles as they mark a history that centers on the experience of ethnic Mexican and Latinx peoples in the US to inspire and reinspire the young and old, to continue their struggle to realize the ideal of justice for all.
The Massachusetts legislature recently exonerated Elizabeth Johnson, though her confession and conviction shows how "members of the Puritan communities of early Massachusetts could readily convince themselves that in some way or other, perhaps at a moment of weakness, they really had allowed Satan into their lives."
