Place

This northern city was shaped by racial terrorism and persistent advocacy for Black liberation.

A journal of my road trip to the formative decades of American history.

Generations of utopians seeking inspiration and sea breezes made the trek from Greenwich Village to Cape Cod’s picturesque vistas.

A new book about Rikers Island is essentially a labor history, revealing how jail guards seized control from managers, politicians, and judges.

Gene Tong, a popular herbal-medicine doctor in Los Angeles, was hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in American history.

Mary Lumpkin’s life helps us to better understand the post-Civil War push for education.

The 400-year-old site of Jamestown, Va., battered by flooding and climate change, is listed as endangered.

At one of Boston’s historical burial grounds, more than 1,000 Black Bostonians were laid to rest in unmarked graves. Their legacy continues to haunt us today.

Laws meant to safeguard great buildings and neighborhoods can also present an obstacle to social progress.

What kind of place was the town I grew up in?

Western landscapes and their names are stratified with personal memories, ancestral teachings, mythic events and colonial disturbances.

Joetha Collier, a young Black woman, was killed by a white man in 1971, near the Mississippi town where Emmett Till was murdered. Why isn’t her case well-known today?

A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people.

Three books offer views of the shift from public planning to neoliberal privatization, and emphasize the need to reclaim planning in the public interest.

How an industry responded to the needs of workers and of the federal government during a time of rapid mobilization for wartime production.

The American Midwest was once a site of radical experimentation for various communitarian groups. What has become of their legacy?

How an old textbook lodged itself in the heart of New Orleans’ self-mythology.

Photographs of Ellis Island and the people who arrived there seeking a better life.

Washington has long been a disproportionately gay city—a mecca for clever, ambitious young men who want to escape their hometowns’ prying eyes.

A stubborn and surprising immigrant enclave, hiding in plain sight on the Lower East Side.

The killing of three civil-rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964 changed America.

Forced to bear her enslaver's children, Mary Lumpkin later forged her own path to freedom.

Interactive map shows Milwaukee’s housing patterns reflect not only aesthetic trends but also how historical events like immigration, war and civil rights shaped the city.

In the 1960s, a man named Robert E. Simon Jr. dreamed of a city that would be open to all, regardless of race or income: Reston, VA.

For nearly all of its modern existence, the Great Dismal Swamp has been excluded from U.S. history. Now there’s a push to bring its significance to light.

Her narrative documents the very real dangers enslaved runaways experienced while traveling through so-called "free states" of the North.

The National Black Political Convention of 1972 saw many national giants on the Black political scene.

"Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin" is a vibrant cultural history that looks beyond pervasive narratives of cultural renaissance and urban neglect.

Why dam removal is critical for restoring the Charles River.

A history of imperial forgetting.