How did white supremacist lawmakers get around the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote, and later, the 19th Amendment, which should have secured the vote for Black women? Here’s a look at their legal and illegal methods.

Boston’s “freedom summer” ended on Sept. 18, 1776, when the city ordered the guardhouses closed and the city to reopen for business.

Credulous reporting about space aliens from the highest reaches of the government might make it seem as though we have entered a new phase of U.S. history — but we haven’t. In fact, since the early republic, U.S. officials have been worried about space aliens.

Many Americans are still techno-optimists in some ways. Technology is the factor cited most as having improved life over the last half century. But in recent years, it seems like this optimism has been gradually eroded, replaced in part by skepticism and fear.

In recent years, the rise in hate speech, antisemitism, racism and xenophobia has provided renewed momentum to legislative efforts, bringing the number of states requiring some form of Holocaust and genocide education to 19, as of this month. Even so, state boards of education rarely provide the additional resources necessary to gain specialized training on the topic.

The federal gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993, and as a result its real value has been cut in half, requiring Congress to regularly top-up the Highway Trust Fund. The gas tax was supposed to steadily fill the fund’s accounts, allowing Congress to allocate the money to new capital projects. The idea was for the heaviest users of the highways to bear most of the cost of their construction.