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The Freedom of Information Act is 50 years old

Fifty years ago on July 4, 1966, Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Freedom of Information Act while vacationing at his Texas ranch. But he hated the concept.

How Donald Trump’s 1993 comments about ‘Indians’ previewed much of his 2016 campaign

Among the various incidents in Donald Trump's pre-political past that have rumbled through the public's awareness over the past year was a moment when he said that the operators of Native American casinos as "don’t look like Indians to me."

Emotional tributes mark 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme

On Friday, exactly 100 years after the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, everyone remembered the men who got on and did it, without stopping to question their orders.

Ku Klux Klan dreams of rising again 150 years after founding

The Klan is trying to reshape itself for a new era.

Brexit might undermine Europe’s democratic order

It is easy to forget that democracy in Europe is a relatively recent development.

The World's Oldest Library Has Reopened

The world’s oldest working library at the al-Qarawiyyin University in Fez, Morocco is once again open and ready for visitors, having been closed for massive restorations since 2012.

Doug Wilder’s dream of building a slavery museum in Richmond is dying

One reason may be that the $540 million National Museum of African American History and Culture is set to open on the Mall in Washington this fall.

What past US presidents have said to Canada’s Parliament

Barack Obama will be the seventh president to address a joint session of Parliament.

Confirmation that Shakespeare was Shakespeare

The finding is based on a family coat of arms he had a hand in protecting.

Holocaust escape tunnel discovery a blow against deniers

“It was dug out by spoons. By people who were shackled around the ankles”

A DNA Test Won’t Explain Elizabeth Warren’s Ancestry

DNA testing cannot definitively prove whether a person is Cherokee. Or a member of any community, at least not reliably.

The conservative attack on the AP test for European history is beginning to gain traction

More websites (like the College Fix) are relating the complaints of the right-of-center National Association of Scholars.

Colonel claims the Pershing II missile brought down the Berlin Wall

"The Berlin Wall fell because of the success of the Pershing II."

Few Top Schools Require History Majors to Broadly Study U.S.’s Past

A new report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that just 23 of the institutions among the 76 deemed to be the “best” by U.S. News & World Report’s 2016 rankings require history majors to take at least one U.S. history course.

WWII-Era Japanese-American Internment Camp Excavated

A World War II-era internment camp near Heart Mountain, Wyoming, is under excavation by archaeologists keen to understand the everyday lives of the Japanese-Americans incarcerated there.

Nazi Detector App Brands Right-Wing Extremists — and Donald Trump

An internet tool singles out extreme right-wingers online — and Donald Trump — by putting swastikas around their names, mirroring an earlier application that neo-Nazis used to identify Jews online.

Gays are being put back into American history. Quietly.

President Obama’s designation on Friday of the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village as a national monument comes amid a push across the country to write lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people into the nation’s collective history, an effort that has been quietly underway for years.

India’s ‘Brexit’ Took More Than a Referendum

It has been almost 70 years since Britain exited India.

Brexit: What Historians Are Saying

by HNN Staff

Simon Schama, Timothy Garton Ash, Andrew Roberts, and other historians comment on Brexit.

How Referendums Like the Brexit Vote Became a Thing

The history of the referendum goes all the way back to Roman times, but their rise to common usage has more to do with the 1980s.