Livia Gershon

For a burgeoning consumer society, store-bought flags and bonnets offered proof that commercialism could go hand in hand with heartfelt emotion.

Consumer debt shapes American lives so thoroughly that it seems eternal and immortal, but it’s actually relatively new to the financial world.

As more women embraced music as a profession, more men became worried that the world of the orchestra was losing its masculinity.

The breeding of race horses validated those aspiring to belong to an American elite while feeding into racist beliefs about genetic inheritance.

In Early America, some prestigious residents advocated for the replacement of cane sugar, supplied by enslaved workers, with maple sugar from family farms.

Freedman's Village, created in Arlington, VA at the end of the Civil War, became a thriving community of Black residents as part of Reconstruction.

The musical traditions found in contemporary Black U.S. and Caribbean Christian worship originated hundreds of years ago, continents away.

The best-selling musical artist in the world in 1969, Johnny Cash sang of (and for) the "forgotten Americans": the imprisoned men of all races.

In moving away from fossil fuels, some in aviation are thinking of bringing back helium-assisted flight.

Researchers discovered the remains of a mid-19th century house, a centuries-old Chinese coin and other traces of the short-lived town of Terrace.

The Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, and other political formations generally separated military and civil leadership and guarded certain personal freedoms.

In the nineteenth century, laws in many parts of the country prohibited "undeserving" disabled people from appearing in public.

Far from ushering in a zero-waste world, the switch from returnables to recycling provided cover for the creation of ever more packaging trash.

Maritime workers who were basically kidnapped into the British Royal Navy were a key force in the War of Independence.

A government-funded group called the Writers' War Board got writers and illustrators to portray the United States positively—and its enemies as evil.

Dogs were prolific hunters and warm companions for northeastern Native peoples like the Mi'kmaq.

In the years after the Civil War, some wanted a new seat of government that would be closer to the geographic center of a growing nation.

Having more than one wife was an established part of life for some Native peoples before Europeans tried to end the practice.

Three hundred years ago, Cotton Mather starred in a debate about treating smallpox that tore Boston apart.

Travelers brought the Chinese game to American shores in the early 1920s. Why was it such a hit?

From "insurrection" to "rebellion" to "Civil War," finding a name for the conflict was always political.

The first edition of the beloved novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory featured "pygmy" characters taken from Africa.

Born 14 years after the nation's founding, the tenth commander-in-chief still has one living grandson.

"Hispanic" as the name of an ethnicity is contested today. But the category arose from a political need for unity.