Place

Tourist-driven curiosity about the so-called "haunted asylum" has led many to overlook the real people who once were institutionalized within these hospitals.

A film produced by Western Electric, a haunting glimpse into the construction of the Twin Towers in New York and their early use.

Redlining in Omaha began in the 1920s. Although outlawed in the 1960s, its effects are still present in the city's demographics.

50 years after closing its schools to fight racial integration, a Virginia county still feels the effects.

In the 1920s, Washingtonians dealt with the summer heat by going to the nearest beach...at the Tidal Basin.

In 1968, impoverished Americans flocked to DC to live out MLK's final dream: economic equality for all.

The Obama library lands on Chicago.

Mapping historical photos from the New York Pubic Library.

In 1917, the U.S. Navy built a full-size battleship in the heart of New York City.

Migration further west began almost immediately after Reconstruction ended, as Black Americans initiated the "Great Exodus" outside the South toward Kansas.

Using oral histories of early East Texas oil workers, recorded in the 1950s, we hear about the chaos and excess that accompanied the discovery of oil.

Until about 100 years ago, grasses up to two feet high blanketed swaths of the Sonoran Desert.

After a Rio Grande flood shifted a 437-acre strip of land from Mexico to Texas, the area was the site of a long border dispute.

Why has Michigan continued to draw so many immigrants from the Arab world, creating one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East?

America's first mall was designed as an insular utopia, providing shelter and a controlled environment during uncertain times.

As the hunger for more farmland stretched west, so too did the demand for enslaved labor.

In the same year as the Salem Witch Trials, a more common and lesser known witch hunt occurred in Stamford, Connecticut.

In the 1780s, medical schools used cadavers stolen from the cemeteries of slaves.

The U.S. just can't seem to let go of its naval base on Cuba.

It is more likely that immigrants were their own agents of change.

How garbage physically shaped the development of New York.

As immigration flows changed, Orange County's demographics changed and so did its political leanings.

While Louisiana began as a French colony and its culture remained Creole, its Anglo-American population formed a large minority in the late colonial period.

A pastor's son reflects on his evangelical father's beliefs regarding politics in the pulpit.

Mississippi may be the nation’s most religious state, but it is also far more complex and dynamic than many commentators admit.

The causes were many, but police brutality and economic insecurity were supercharged in Los Angeles after the 1984 Olympics. 

How the New Left, urban renewal, safety concerns, and child psychology affected the design of New York playgrounds.

The great bonfires of Gallows Hill—and what they tell us about America.

Reflections on the ahistorical, aristocratic, and romanticist approach to "nature" elevated by John Muir, and by his admirer, Ken Burns.

Mannahatta's fascinating pre-city ecology of hills, rivers, wildlife when Times Square was a wetland and you couldn't get delivery.