Excerpts

How garbage physically shaped the development of New York.

An animation of the historical trends of New York's growth since its founding.

How Ivy Litvinov, the English-born wife of a Soviet ambassador, seduced America with wit, tea and soft diplomacy.

If the Biden administration wants to address migration, it must recognize U.S. complicity in Guatemala’s problems.

How 20th-century curriculum controversies foreshadowed this summer’s wave of legislation.

The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti over ninety years ago is a reminder of how the American state treats radicals.

The Rosenbergs were executed for being Soviet spies, but their sons have spent decades trying to clear their mother’s name. Are they close to a breakthrough?

We need to do far more than “give voice to the voiceless" to win justice.

Mark Massaro reviews Jason Vuic’s “The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream.”

Politicians are suddenly eager to disown failed policies on American prisons, but they have failed to reckon with the history.

In Fayette County, West Virginia, expanding the document of disaster.

Wildly popular accounts like @HistoryInPics are bad for history, bad for Twitter, and bad for you.

The incredible story of thousands of soldier photographs and letters that never made it home.

At his peak, newspapers loved to tease the inventor. They also feared him.

With help from the CIA, Paul Engle’s writing students battled Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing still lingers.

A new book about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping focuses on the role played by the media.

Alfredo Villanueva-Collado on his J.C. Leyendecker collection and the fascinating story behind this oft-neglected male image maker.

The Apsáalooke artist has created a major new installation for her solo show at the Joslyn Art Museum using photographs of the 500 delegates taken in 1898.

Jill Lepore on disease outbreaks of pandemic proportions, media scares, and the parrot-fever panic of 1930.

Kevin Cook on the warnings NASA ignored, with tragic results.

Kodak changed the way Americans saw themselves and their country. But it struggled to reinvent itself for the digital age.

Dickens, Tocqueville, and the U.N. all agree about this American invention: It’s torture.

When a remarkable new invention by Louis Daguerre was announced by the French, it was American inventor Samuel Morse who sensed its commercial potential.

To what extent did the Union general's famous orders actually liberate the enslaved in Texas?

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

On the 100th anniversary of Yuri Kochiyama’s birth and the passage of the Emergency Quota Act, Railton explores inclusion and exclusion in US history.

Tsökahovi Tewanima held an American record in running for decades, but his training at the infamous Carlisle school kept him from his ancestral Hopi lands

A new history charts the radical agitation around Black rights and freedom back to the early nineteenth century. 

Remembering a year of hell and devastation—the year of the Spanish flu.

As a political reporter, I've seen four Republican revolutions — Reagan’s, Gingrich’s, the Tea Party’s and Trump’s — each of which took the party farther right.

Mark Edmundson on the great American poet as a defender of democracy.

A brief history of camping.

In 1838, as the U.S. began its Exploring Expedition to the South Seas, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue.

One hundred years later, it’s time to challenge a long-held bias.

A review of Jon Meacham's newest book and documentary.

People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?

The new note comes 125 years after the free silver movement tried—and failed—to use currency to forge a national identity.

Government support created jobs, built trust, and invigorated American literature. We should try it again.

A forgotten chapter in the history of feminism: why American women chose to flee the West for ‘freedom’ in Soviet Russia.

John Marshall not only owned people; he owned many of them, and aggressively bought them when he could.

A drama about an interracial uprising in colonial Virginia.

Full employment could solve job discrimination and inadequate wages.

VinePair interviewed eight LGBTQ+ archivers around the country about documenting America’s gay and lesbian bars while they still can.

Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.

The Chicago Monuments Project is searching for ways to resolve its landscape of problematic statues and make room for a new, different kind of public memorial.

How African American women represented Black motherhood in the early nineteenth century.

Initially supportive of Belgian King Leopold II’s claim to have created a “free state” of Congo, Williams changed his mind when he saw the horrors of empire.

Commemoration of the 14th Amendment must not display the abundance of freedom, but the hunger for it on both sides of the border.

The $2,500 verdict, the largest ever of its kind, offers evidence of the generational impact such awards can have.

Communes, free love, coming out, getting arrested, consciousness-raising rap sessions, gun shooting, acid dropping, and trying to be macrobiotic at McDonald’s.