Understanding why Trump is using El Salvador to test the limits of illegal deportation requires returning to the US’s long history of outsourcing violence.

“Never again” and the “responsibility to protect” now license forcible territorial annexation.

The veterans of Kagnew Station saw the early growth of the surveillance state. Has the passage of time given them a new understanding of their work?

In a militarized territory like Guam, everything is political, even cancer.

So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores?

Unpacking empires and diaspora in Mexico and the United States.

Trump’s “Art of” trilogy may be full of willful exaggeration, but the books also reveal how the 1980s and 90s formed his dog-eat-dog worldview.

The liberal jeremiad warns that democracy is fragile, institutions must be defended, and that vigilance is the price of liberty.

It used to be progressives who distrusted the experts. What happened?

Trump and his cronies’ style reflects a platform where grievance is currency and performance is power.

The torturers have been revising, the gestapos have been busy, and the prisons have been full for generations.

In working through the Winter case files, I often felt pinpricks of déjà vu: an exact turn of phrase, an absurdly specific expenditure.

A complex history weaves along the Trail of Tears to connect Eufaula, Alabama, with its namesake in Oklahoma.

How the City College of New York went from an experiment in public education to an intellectual hot spot for working class and immigrant students.

Nationalism chooses sides in the most awful family drama of all time. It sides with the evildoers, and never with their victims, and teaches you to do the same.

How the marriage of American exceptionalism and liberal Zionism led to genocide.

Cities across the American West are issuing belated apologies for 19th-century expulsions of Chinese residents, but their meaning and audience remain uncertain.

Can the racialist and eugenicist roots of statistics be cordoned off from “proper” science?

As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.

No one remembers the assassination of Congressman James M. Hinds. What do we risk by making it just another part of American history?

Digging through dictionary archives to uncover the slowly changing meaning of “redskin.”

Eighty years of talking peace and preparing for nuclear war.

A new theory of the leisure class influencer.

Don't let its universalist language fool you.

Neoliberals long preached that markets and technology reinforce each other. In reality, when one develops, the other tends to stagnate.

Israel has long relied on Western patrons for arms and backing—even as it has cast itself as a security “innovator” the West can’t afford to do without.

How a lost copy of the Declaration of Independence unlocked a historical mystery.

The geological origins of the American Revolution.

A war photographer’s unflinching images break the idealism surrounding a young Civil War hero’s death.

As "The Best American Poetry" anthology ends after nearly forty years, the contradictions of its influence stand out.

Lists of great artists say more about the list-maker than the artist.

With his strange machines and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created a new technique for improving strength and movement.

Columbia is at war with its intellectual heritage.

A scorched shoe is a crucial part of Zelda Fitzgerald’s modern mythology. But there’s no proof it existed.

In the 1910 World Heavyweight Championship, London cheered on Jim Jeffries as he faced off with Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion.