Matthew Wills

South Dakota has been called "the Mississippi of the North" for its long history of making voting hard for Native Americans.

Women's clubs were popular after the Civil War among white and Black women. But white clubwomen used their influence to ingrain racist curriculum in schools.

The charivari (or shivaree) was a ritual in which people on the lower rungs of a community called out neighbors who violated social and sexual norms.

How the dental history of the nation’s first president is interwoven with slavery and privilege.

The African American Patriot, who died in the Boston Massacre, was erased from visual history. Black abolitionists revived his memory.

The Oneida Community's Christian form of collectivism was transported to California in the 1880s, when the original Oneida Community fell apart.

The founder of cultural anthropology, Franz Boas challenged the reigning notions of race and culture.

The Comte de Buffon's thirty-six volume Natural History claimed that America was a land of degeneracy. That enraged Thomas Jefferson.

In 1950, the U.S. State Department fired 91 employees because they were homosexual or suspected of being homosexual.

From colonial times to the nineteenth century, Thanksgiving was very different from the holiday we know now.

Are whistleblowers heroes or traitors? It depends who you ask.

On September 1st, 1858, a mob stormed the New York Marine Hospital in Staten Island, and set fire to the building.

Submarines played a major role in WW I. But the first submersible was actually used, unsuccessfully, in the Revolutionary War.

In 1919, a brutal outburst of mob violence was directed against African Americans across the United States. White, uniformed servicemen led the charge.

Remembering the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and how she challenged American stereotypes.

The outlandish "macaroni" style of 18th-century England blurred the boundaries of gender, as well as class and nationality.

In the minds of some Southern Protestants, slavery had been divinely sanctioned.

The 1874 locust swarm was estimated to be twice the square mileage of the state of Colorado. Why don't locusts swarm anymore?

Susan Fenimore Cooper is now being recognized as one of the nation's first environmentalists.

Russian serfdom and American slavery ended within two years of each other; the defenders of these systems of bondage surprisingly shared many of the same arguments.

The pandemic was the most lethal global disease outbreak since the Black Death. What were people thinking at the time?

Although Karl Marx never saw the U.S., he thought long and hard about how it fit into his theory, especially during the Civil War.

This isn’t all history, of course. The Espionage Act is still on the books: Chelsea Manning was charged under it in 2011.

Ronald Reagan is at the heart of the modern American politics of advertising, public relations, and a television in every home.