team history

Humans have been captivated by Mars almost as long as we’ve been watching the night sky. The ancient Greeks and Romans watched nightly as a reddish dot moved among the stars, growing dimmer and brighter in a two-year cycle. Each named it for the god of war; the Roman version, ...read more

For nearly seven decades, the Kim family dynasty has warned the North Korean people that the United States is a murderous superpower bent upon their annihilation—and their only chance of survival is readiness for an American attack. This policy of paranoia without end has driven ...read more

Great events do not always have great causes. One of history’s biggest surprises is how sometimes a series of small, seemingly insignificant events can suddenly add up to momentous change. That’s how it happened with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the point-of-no-return moment in ...read more

Two short years after 1968, the year the United States endured a series of cataclysmic episodes of politically tinged bloodletting, historian Richard Hofstadter observed that “Americans certainly have a reason to inquire whether…they are not a people of exceptional violence.” ...read more

The triumph of Christianity over the pagan religions of ancient Rome led to the greatest historical transformation the West has ever seen: a transformation that was not only religious, but also social, political and cultural. Just in terms of “high culture,” Western art, music, ...read more

Image Credit: Will Widmer/Redux The skeletal remains of an industrial city scroll across the windshield of a cruising automobile. Empty highway off-ramps loop overhead while roadside factories spew filth into pallid skies. A guitar strums the opening chords of Eminem’s “Lose ...read more

“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” wrote Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich memorably in 1976. She argued that “ordinary” women who don’t happen to marry future presidents…or lead the way to be the first in their fields…or get burned at the stake are rarely ...read more

What does the United States want to be to the world? And what would the world like? A welcoming beacon of democracy? A partner in trade and security? A wary, but distant ally? Or a fortress that has pulled up its drawbridge? For America’s allies and foes alike, the messaging of ...read more

Something about land lies deep in the American psyche. Since the early 20th century most Americans have resided in cities and suburbs, yet the mystique of agrarian life draws millions to farmers’ markets and makes the family farm a touchstone of American politics. The cowboy, ...read more

This may sound odd coming from a scholar of women’s history and a newly minted legislator, but I think we’ve heard enough about women’s suffrage. When New York State recently marked the 100th anniversary of its passage of women’s right to vote, I ought to have joined the ...read more

Two assassinations, a bloody war, violent protests, racial unrest, colorful hippies, a celebration of sex and rebellion, and John Lennon’s countercultural anthem, “Revolution”—1968 had them all. It was the year that shattered the fragile consensus that had shaped American society ...read more

Dominant at home and feared abroad, Vladimir Putin has come a long way since 2000, when he took over an ailing Russia still traumatized from the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade previously. Then, Putin was seen as a gray nobody, another technocrat that Boris Yeltsin had made ...read more

Debates over immigration policy have assumed center stage in Washington and have even contributed to a government shutdown. President Donald Trump and his conservative allies want to put an end to “chain migration” that he says allows “truly evil” people into the United States. ...read more

The first time I heard the word feminist was in 1988, when I was in 6th grade. I was a good student with the absolute best, best friend. She was a feminist, and had decided so at age 12. We would talk about it, and I agreed with everything she said. But for some reason, the label ...read more

In the closing days of 2017, President Donald Trump scored his sole major legislative victory by pushing through Congress a sweeping tax cut. Every objective analysis of the new legislation has found that it overwhelmingly benefits wealthy people and corporations—and adds more ...read more

In 2006 I walked into a dim and dusty backroom of an old courthouse in upstate New York and my heart stopped. Before me stood a wall of shelves on which thousands of pieces of paper had been haphazardly crammed—countless documents related to the Attica prison uprising of 1971 ...read more

In a year exhausted by one of the more frenetic news agendas in memory, an easily overlooked development has been the re-emergence of patient, persistent civic engagement and activism. The massive marches that rang in the new year dispersed, but we didn’t go home. We packed ...read more

Predicting history is a notoriously tricky business, but our team of historians, experts and thought leaders have come up with lessons of the past to help us understand the future. So, what’s next for 2018? Inequality: In 2014 the French economist Thomas Piketty became a global ...read more