Originals

What we remember when we remember the Alamo.

Almost by accident, we find ourselves at the epicenter of the Colorado Gold Rush, which attracted prospectors to the Rockies a decade after the famous bonanza of ‘49.

After navigating a minor hiccup in our own provisioning process, we set out for the West on what would be our longest trip yet.

Tracing the life of the author who seemed to be from both everywhere and nowhere.

In the streets of New York, we try to imagine the city as Walt Whitman, and other artists of his time, experienced it.

The Arch in St. Louis stands as a monument to contradictory histories.

Tracing the currents of American history that run through the Great Lakes region.

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

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

On the trail of whales, Melville, and Douglass in New Bedford.

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.

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

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

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

There is a long and storied tradition of feeling underwhelmed by the natural spectacle of Niagara Falls. Still, the visitors keep coming.

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

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

An annotated collection of resources from the Bunk archive that help explain the long history of housing discrimination.

An annotated collection of resources from the Bunk archive that help explain the shifting sands of American politics.

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

Exploring the homes of two presidents, the birthplace of another, and a natural wonder that once drew visitors from far and wide.

Ed Ayers travels back to his childhood stomping grounds in search of traces of the dispossession that took place there generations earlier.

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

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.

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

Bunk's American History Top 40.

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

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