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The Epic Bar Fight That Sums Up the Problem with Memorial Day

A Depression-era story of mourning, motherhood, and grandiosity.
Entry in Theodore Roosevelt's diary with an "X" from the day his wife died.

Theodore Roosevelt & Valentine’s Day

How Theodore's Roosevelt's personal tragedies inspired him to reform America's cities.
Illustrated cover of the "Secret Garden"

100 Years of The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett's biographer considers her life and how personal tragedy underpinned the creation of her most famous work.
Joe Biden as a new Senator, sitting next to framed photographs of his family

Death and the All-American Boy

Joe Biden was a lot more careful around the press after this 1974 profile.
Ticket for Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral service at Morehouse College, April 9, 1968.

The Shot That Echoes Still

James Baldwin's dispatch from MLK's funeral foreshadowed an America we may never escape.
Col. Elmer Ellsworth

Ellsworth, Embalming, and the Birth of the Modern American Funeral

Colonel Elmer Ellsworth's death marked a turning point in how the nation honored the fallen.
A drawing of a microscopic slide of Bacterium lactis.

Dying Before Germ Theory

The harrowing experience of being powerless against illness and death.
A monument to fallen Civil War soldiers with the New York City skyline in the background.

Green-Wood Cemetery’s Living Dead

How the “forever business” is changing at New York City’s biggest graveyard.
A cartoon depicts two bandaged men suspended on the scales of justice raising their fists at each other.

Jack London’s Fantastic Revenge

In his short story “The Benefit of the Doubt,” Jack London turned truth into fiction, and then some.
A painting of Marie-Louise Coidavid.
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The First and Last Queen of Haiti in Exile

Queen Marie-Louise outlived most of her family, yet her story about the revolution and its aftermath was rarely consulted by those writing the era’s history.
Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennet

The Frenemies Who Fought to Bring Birth Control to the U.S.

Though Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett shared a mission, they took very different approaches. Their rivalry was political, sometimes even personal.
An illustration of Florence March, a White House maid, and the ghost of a boy inside the White House.

The Thing in the White House

The White House's most terrifying ghost and the maid who saw it.
Small headstones for pets in Hyde Park, London, dating back to the 1880s.

Why the World’s First Pet Cemetery Was Revolutionary

A new book charts the history of pet cemeteries and honors the universal experience of grieving an animal companion.
Horace Greeley

This Presidential Candidate Died in a Sanatorium Less Than a Month After Losing the Election

Horace Greeley ran against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant in November 1872. Twenty-four days later, he died of unknown causes at a private mental health facility.
Foggy hills in Appalachia.

Love in the Time of Hillbilly Elegy: On JD Vance’s Appalachian Grift

Justin B. Wymer knows a snake when he sees one.
Two students holding peace armbands.
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Civics Skills: How the Supreme Court's Tinker Ruling Affects Students

An anti-Vietnam protest that resulted in the Supreme Court confirming that students are persons under the constitution.
Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1857.

The Essential Emerson

The latest biography of the great transcendentalist captures the paradoxes of his Yankee mind.
Liberty holding an American flag with "For the Union" written on it.
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Capturing the Civil War

The images, diaries, and ephemera in Grand Valley State University’s Civil War and Slavery Collection reveal the cold realities of Abraham Lincoln’s world.
Civil War soldiers on horseback with pistols.

The Hunt for John Wilkes Booth Goes On

A new television miniseries depicts the pursuit of Lincoln’s killer. But the public appetite for tales about the chase began even as it was happening.
James Baldwin.

What James Baldwin Saw

A documentary that follows the writer’s late-in-life journey to the South chronicles his vision for Black politics in a post–Civil Rights era world.
All-Black Lincoln Cemetery.

Black Civil War Veterans Remain Segregated Even in Death

Denied burial alongside Union soldiers killed during the Battle of Gettysburg, the 30 or so men were instead buried in the all-Black Lincoln Cemetery.
Black and white portrait of Jones Very

The Voice of Unfiltered Spirit

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.
Book cover of "Living the Dream" by Daniel T. Fleming.

Fighting to Desegregate the American Calendar

As a versatile but complex hero, King led a life open to interpretation by politicians and activists of all types who fiercely debated his legacy.
Statue of Pocahontas.

Pocahontas, Remembered

After 400 years, reality has begun to replace the lies.
Gen. James Longstreet.

The Conquered General

The back-and-forth life of Confederate James Longstreet.

Have We Learned Nothing?

The comparison between last weekend's Hamas attack and 9/11 is apt.
American blues singer and guitarist Leadbelly performs for a room full of people, 1940.

Is the History of American Art a History of Failure?

Sara Marcus’s recent book argues that from the Reconstruction to the AIDS era, a distinct aesthetic formed around defeat in the realm of politics.
Aftermath of a riot in Washington, D.C., following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in 1968. Photography by Warren K. Leffler, via the Library of Congress.

After the Murder

Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was the fateful moment that the wave of hope finally broke for Black America.
Henry David Thoreau with a propeller cap.

Henry David Thoreau Was Funnier Than You Think, Particularly on the Subject of Work

On the necessary “deep sincerity” of dark humor.

The Busboy

Witness to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

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