A still from "It's a Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" of two children in a pumpkin patch at night.
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How the Great Pumpkin Became Great

The origins of Linus's pumpkin deity, who "rises out of the pumpkin patch and flies through the air and brings toys to all the children in the world."

When Young George Washington Started a War

A just-discovered eyewitness account provides startling new evidence about who fired the shot that sparked the French and Indian War.

The University of Texas’s Secret Strategy to Keep Out Black Students

Long-hidden documents show the school’s blueprint for slowing integration during the civil-rights era.
Chester Harding

Chester Harding’s My Egotistigraphy (1866)

Privately published memoir of an American portraitist who grew up in a log cabin and went on to paint presidents and Daniel Boone.

The Hidden Story of Two African American Women

An historian discovers the portraits of two women all bound up in the pages of a 19th-century book.
A clue and black clay figuring with a Sony Watchman attached as its "head."

Please, My Digital Archive. It’s Very Sick.

Our past on the internet is disappearing before we can make it history.
Workers atop the 70-story RCA building in New York's Rockefeller Center having lunch on a steel beam.

One of the Most Iconic Photos of American Workers is Not What it Seems

But “Lunch atop a Skyscraper,” which was taken during the Great Depression, has come to represent the country's resilience, especially on Labor Day.
Crop circles in the middle of a field.
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Pssst, Crop Circles Were a Hoax

In the late 1970s, mysterious circular patterns started showing up in farm fields.

Letters of the Damned: Exorcising the Curse of the Petrified Forest

Letters come in each year with pilfered stones from the national park, hoping to break the senders' curse.
Tintype photograph of Omar Ibn Said.

Educated and Enslaved

The journey of Omar Ibn Said.
John H. Johnson

The World-Class Photography of Ebony and Jet is Priceless History. It's Still Up For Sale.

There's a lot more than money at stake in the impending auction.
Engraving of Harriet Beecher Stowe in profile.

How the Camera Introduced Americans to Their Heroines

A new show at the National Portrait Gallery spotlights figures including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretia Mott and Margaret Fuller.

An Eight-Second Film of 1915 New Orleans and the Mystery of Louis Armstrong’s Happiness

How could Armstrong, born indisputably black at the height of Jim Crow and raised poor, be so happy?

Jane Addams, Mary Rozet Smith, And The Disappointments of One-Sided Correspondence

Lost letters between Jane Addams and her best friend leave questions for historians,

A Lost Work by Langston Hughes Examines the Harsh Life on the Chain Gang

In 1933, the Harlem Renaissance star wrote a powerful essay about race. It has never been published in English—until now.

A Gay First Lady? Yes, We’ve Already Had One, and Here Are Her Love Letters.

Rose Cleveland declared her passion for the woman she had a relationship with spanning three decades in letter after letter.
Glowing white "No" against a red background.

“Perhaps We’re Being Dense.” Rejection Letters Sent to Famous Writers

Some kind, some weird, some unbelievably harsh.

The Light of Battle Was in Their Eyes

The correspondence of Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George C. Marshall leading up to D-Day.
A man holding a boy in a sailor outfit stand outside looking at a news ticker on D-Day.

A WWII Combat Photographer's Long-Lost Images of D-Day in NYC

News of the invasion spread quickly that morning. Phil Stern captured a city still processing the news—but his photos were lost for decades.
Women voters cast ballots at 57th Street and Lexington Avenue, in 1917.

New York’s First-Time Women Voters

A 1918 dispatch from a Yiddish newspaper documents the experiences of women legally voting for the first time.
Emma Grimes Robinson

These Photo Albums Offer a Rare Glimpse of 19th-Century Boston’s Black Community

Thanks to the new acquisition, scholars at the Athenaeum library are connecting the dots of the city’s history of abolitionists.
Hop Louie Restaurant in Los Angeles, California.

The Old Menus of New Chinatown

Retracing the history of Chinatown in Los Angeles using old Chinese restaurant menus as a guide.
Police car.
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What the Loss of the New York Police Museum Means for Criminal-Justice Reform

Without historical records, we lose key insights into how law enforcement works — and how it fails.

Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia

A conversation with the curator of an exhibit about the oft-overlooked lives of women in early colonial Virginia.

New Online: The AP Washington Bureau, 1915-1930

Wire service reporting from the capital provided much of the nation with coverage of federal government and politics.
Men detained during anti-government demonstrations in Buenos Aires in 1982.

Secret Archives Show US Helped Argentine Military Wage ‘Dirty War’ That Killed 30,000

The archives narrate the human rights abuses committed by Argentina’s military government, often with the assistance of the US.
Postcard sent to a South Carolina clergyman who counseled women on pregnancies.

“Our Moral Obligation:” The Pastors That Counseled in Pre-Roe South Carolina

Before the Roe decision, at least 68 South Carolina clergymen actively counseled women on where they should receive abortions.
Upset students surround a victim of the Kent State shooting.

49 Years After Kent State Massacre, New Photos Revealed

Getty Images has released new photos of the Kent State shootings, 49 years after they happened.
Internet Archive servers.

Data Overload

How will the historians of the future manage the massive archival data our society has begun to compile on the internet?

The "Beneficial Exercise" of Walking the Trail of Tears

An examination of the excuses used to justify Andrew Jackson's violent expulsion of the Cherokee from their ancestral lands.