Place

Right after slavery ended in the United States, thousands of Black people, formerly enslaved by white slave holders in the South, flooded Washington, DC.

Far from being a new debate, the discussion over extending home rule to Washingtonians has been around as long as the District of Columbia itself.

Stanley Greenberg has spent decades answering the question of how water arrives in our taps and building interest in this vast and impressive system.

As plans are laid for a new casino, one can trace, through four figures, a history of rivalry and excess, rife with collisions of character and crime.

A roving history makes the case for shade’s centrality to public health, climate adaptation, and even a more robust and inclusive public sphere.

Muir Woods National Monument added contextual notes to signs, filling in historical gaps. The Trump administration removed them.

From slum clearance to beatnik protests, how Greenwich Village became a battleground over race, art, and redevelopment.

In 1872, former slave Mary Virginia Montgomery, now a cotton plantation owner, records her life’s changes after moving from slavery to self-sufficiency.

Mount Rushmore and storytelling at America’s national parks.

Coming to terms with free-state slavery through historic buildings and public history.

The Declaration of Independence condemns King George III. But the British were not to blame for one of the war’s most infamous conflagrations.

Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.

A teacher tells the story of 1974’s Olean, New York High School murders.

In the 1960s, amid the shipping industry's decline, the empty piers became a site for cruising and creativity for gay men in particular.

Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has also been a place where those liberties end.

Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.

On the intersection of environmental contamination and violence in the Pacific Northwest.

Much of Mackinac Island was designated as a national park, but was too expensive for the government to maintain, so it was transferred to the State of Michigan.

How the “forever business” is changing at New York City’s biggest graveyard.

LA’s fires and a century of landscape manipulation.

Material history, including at places such as Nottoway, has messages for people studying Black history.

A complex history weaves along the Trail of Tears to connect Eufaula, Alabama, with its namesake in Oklahoma.

Just because it's man-made doesn't mean it's not legitimate.

Texans left an enduring mark on the gunfighter era. The frontier was a darker place because of it.

California has long allowed an ambiguous boundary between public and private land along its coast. Climate change is testing the limits of this compromise.

At Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texans flex their go-it-alone style.

The university’s last “finest hour” was more than 200 years ago.

1925 marked the peak of the Florida land boom. But false advertising and natural disasters thwarted many settlers’ visions of striking it rich.

New York would never be the Puritans' austere city on a hill, yet it became America’s vibrant heart of capitalism.

An interview with Steven Conn about his new book, “Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t.”