Originals

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.

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

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

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.

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

Why historians should stop worrying and embrace the rise of history podcasts by non-scholars.

A recent photography exhibit at the Getty Center raises difficult questions about our capacity for empathy.

A generation ago, historians dismissed the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. On the eve of a reboot, we can see it in a different light.

An appreciation of Alfred Crosby, who coined the term "Columbian exchange."

During the Depression, business leaders knew that public works funding was key to economic growth. Why have we forgotten that lesson?

A new book argues that the fetishization of the first ten amendments is a recent thing – and that it comes at a cost.

Her novels featured dragons and wizards, but they were also deeply grounded in indigenous American ways of thought.

Well off Savannah's tourist trail, there's a replica of an antebellum plantation home in the middle of a public housing project.

Despite his extreme rhetoric, Trump is merely the latest in a long line of U.S. leaders unwilling to pony up for global environmental accords.

One man’s obsession with the ephemera of his industry.

The justification can be found in an obscure section of the Fourteenth Amendment.

A peek inside premodern cookbooks.

The perspectives of older Americans have dominated the debate. It's time we pay more attention to what younger people have to say.

Considering astronomy's history from the shadow of the Arecibo Observatory reveals the discipline's intimate ties to imperialism.

The city that just elected a civil rights lawyer as D.A. is the same city presided over for years by "Mayor Cop" Frank Rizzo.

For decades, the GOP has used tax cuts to achieve its political goals. So why do Dems keep treating "supply-side" as an economic strategy?

Harvard digitizes two centuries of colonial history.

In 1867, African-Americans in Virginia stood up for their new political rights in the face of threats from their white neighbors.

How social media is – and isn't – changing American religion.

Does the trope obscure more than it illuminates about the 2016 election?