View of Brooklyn from Trinity Church, 1853.
original

Mettlesome, Mad, Extravagant City

In the streets of New York, we try to imagine the city as Walt Whitman, and other artists of his time, experienced it.
Design drawing for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Competition, 1947.
original

A Gateway to the Past

The Arch in St. Louis stands as a monument to contradictory histories.
The Battle of Tippecanoe
original

Lost Prophets and Forgotten Heroes

Tracing the currents of American history that run through the Great Lakes region.
View from Nauvoo from across the Mississippi River
original

Community Ideal

Visiting the sites of two 19th-century utopian experiments in the American Midwest.
original

Reviewing the Oppenheimer Reviews

Christopher Nolan's blockbuster has generated a torrent of historical commentary about the birth of nuclear weapons. Is there something missing from the conversation?
original

Freedom By the Sea

On the trail of whales, Melville, and Douglass in New Bedford.
Cover image from the first edition of Thoreau’s Walden
original

The Book Read ‘Round the World

Literary history is packed into Concord’s “Old Manse,” but the tiny abode of Walden’s author proves the highlight of our New England trip.
original

Pieces of the Past

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.
The angel Moroni delivering the plates of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith.
original

Sacred Places

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

No Better Soil

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

The Life of Song

What the surprising career of Bob McGrath teaches us about popular music.
original

Rainbows and Disappointments

There is a long and storied tradition of feeling underwhelmed by the natural spectacle of Niagara Falls. Still, the visitors keep coming.
1849 sketch of Pittsburgh from Coal Hill
original

Time for a Revolution

The economic transformations wrought by industrial capitalism in the 1820s and 30s look different when viewed up close.
original

Tidying Up the Past

A history tour at Harper’s Ferry suggests that “commemoration” and “desecration” might be two sides of the same coin.
original

Redlining is Only Part of the Story

An annotated collection of resources from the Bunk archive that help explain the long history of housing discrimination.
Timeline of the history of American political parties to 1880, depicting intertwined streams of Democrats, Whigs, and Republicans.
original

What is Political Realignment?

An annotated collection of resources from the Bunk archive that help explain the shifting sands of American politics.
Headstones in Mount Auburn cemetery. Photograph by Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003519.
original

A Tour of Mount Auburn Cemetery

Two centuries of New England intellectual history through the lives and ideas of people who are memorialized there.
original

Our Flag Was Still There

How is the first half of the 19th century depicted in and around the nation’s capital? Ed Ayers hits the road to find out.
original

High Domes and Bottomless Pits

On the trip north from TN to OH, Ed Ayers visits the homes of two presidents, the birthplace of another, and a natural wonder that once drew visitors from far and wide.
original

Native Trails

Ed Ayers travels back to his childhood stomping grounds in search of traces of the dispossession that took place there generations earlier.
1865 map of North Carolina & South Carolina
original

Gone to Carolina

Ed Ayers heads south in search of stories from two centuries ago. Traces are there, but larger meanings remain elusive.
original

History on the Road

After decades of reading, writing, and teaching about the American past, Ed Ayers sets out to see how that past is remembered in the places where it happened.
original

American Journey

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

Best History Writing of 2021

Bunk's American History Top 40.
original

The World According to the 1580s

A newly digitized map offers a rare glimpse at the way Europeans conceived of the Americas before British colonization.
original

How America Thought About Refugees 70 Years Ago

And other gleanings from the 1949 run of the Saturday Evening Post.
original

The Drunkard’s Progress

Two hundred years ago, it was hard for Americans to miss the message that they had a serious drinking problem.
original

Legends and Lore

A roadside marker program in New York State embraces the gray area between official history and local lore.
original

Mum’s the Word

In the height of the Cold War, the NSA created a series of posters to keep its secrets from leaking. They're both wonderful and creepy.
original

Zones of Doubt

What we can learn about trade policy from a misbegotten 19th century effort to quantify the chemical properties of wool.