Place

Dispatches from a spine-tingling day of visits to the places where James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Thomas Cole created their most famous works.

A new history examines Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, the West Coast's settler ideology, and recent turbulence in the world of tech.

Jimmy Carter is known as a eradicator of disease and champion for world peace, but he also supported environmental efforts closer to home.

Greene probably has visions of suburban Atlanta in the 1990s and 2000s, not the Civil War.

Lacy M. Johnson walks through a nature center near Houston that has reclaimed the land where a neighborhood, sunken by oil extraction and floodwater, once stood.

How the moons of Mars and the death of a president altered the late nineteenth-century Washington, DC, landscape.

I thought having a rat czar would be an easy win for the city. I was wrong.

What does a statue dedicated to mothers reveal about women’s rights?

Why the first prizefight at Dodger's Stadium would become its last (outside of fiction).

The top educational priorities in the Sunshine State were apparently reading, writing, and anti-communism.

High up on the Colorado Plateau, in what is today the state of New Mexico, sit the remains of what was once a city of epic proportions.

A visit to the site of Joseph Smith’s divine revelation makes for a different kind of public history experience.

Was the nineteenth-century Midwest “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen”?

A new book tells the definitive history of an Alabama community founded by survivors of the slave trade.

The year 2023 marks the centennial of many iconic L.A. landmarks, including the Hollywood sign, Memorial Coliseum, Biltmore Hotel and the Angelus Temple.

The waterway opened up the heartland to trade, transforming small hamlets into industrial centers.

Once a key element in Native economies of the region, clams and oysters became a reliable source of free protein for working-class and poor urban dwellers.

The confluence of Black modernity, self-determinism, and belongingness of Harlem's housing.

Enslaved conspirators in far-flung Accomack County forced some whites to rethink any legislative efforts aiding Black Virginians.

In the late 1960s, Baltimore began demolishing Black neighborhoods to make room for an ill-fated expressway. Will the harm from the Highway to Nowhere ever be repaired?

Benjamin Prine's descendants didn’t know about their family ties – or their connection to his enslaver.

From Stanford to Silicon Valley, a small town in California spread tech’s gospel of data and control.

The president's Nantucket nuclear fallout shelter could become a National Historic Landmark—but efforts to preserve its history have stalled.

From Underground Railroad conductors who risked everything to present-day residents who show kindness to travelers.

Did you know that there was a hidden utopia of formerly enslaved people located in the mountains of Appalachia?

Plants and settlers take root in a new mythology of Arizona.

A landscape has come into being through a constellation of resistances to these strategies of control.

Instead of using the Underground Railroad as a route north, thousands of enslaved Black people fled to communities in the South.

In the first half of the 19th century, upstate New York was a hotbed of movements for reform. How visible is that history today?

Planners of the Interstate Highway System ignored warnings that they were damaging poor Black and Latino neighborhoods.