Livia Gershon

The Town of Boston’s invention of the standing committee 250 years ago provided a means for building consensus during America’s nascent independence movement.

The first feature-length zombie movie emerged from Haitians’ longstanding association of the living dead with slavery and exploited labor.

A commitment to internationalism helped build multi-ethnic campaigns within the more radical and anti-authoritarian side of the US labor movement.

Although most enslaved people worked in the fields, captive workers with strong swimming and diving skills were also exploited by plantation owners.

At the heart of recent US Supreme Court decisions, the Fourteenth Amendment was framed to require free speech and free elections in the South.

Despite the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol consumption was an enormous political issue for many white American Protestants.

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.