Excerpts

The most important design object of our time was more than a century in the making.

Cholera maps chart the movement of the disease, and the terror that accompanied it.

The Trump administration appears ready to invoke the Defense Production Act to speed manufacture of essential goods like face masks.

A century ago, Catholic nuns from Philadelphia recalled what it was like to tend to the needy and the sick during the great influenza pandemic of 1918.

What we can learn from the Spanish flu.

Using the Defense Production Act is long overdue — and the health of our doctors and nurses is at stake.

Government inaction or delay have shaped the course of many infectious disease outbreaks in our country.

The US carceral state is a monstrosity with few parallels in history. But most accounts fail to understand how it was created, and how we can dismantle it.

The Gold Rush introduced a new figure into the American imagination – the effete Eastern urbanite who travels to the Wild West in quest of his fortune.

In the past two centuries, the evolution of the U.S. Census has tracked the country’s social tensions and reflected its political controversies.

Citizenship used to demand sacrifice. Then we taught Americans to buy things instead.

As coronavirus becomes an ever-increasing threat to our lives, there seems to be one thing that people around the world cannot go without the most.

Over the centuries, societies have shown a long history of making the effects of epidemics worse and furthering their own destruction.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Eighty years ago, U.S. industry mobilized in a big way during a crisis. We could do it again.

Nicholas Lemann’s history of 20th century corporations, Transaction Man, shows how an unrelenting faith in the market and profit doomed the American economy.

Tracing the American cemetery from the colonial age to the Gilded Age.

Jim Downs discusses the plight of freed slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

New York, 1907. Mary Mallon spreads infection, unaware that her name will one day become synonymous with typhoid.

There’s a fatal history behind the claim that African Americans are more resistant to diseases like Covid-19 or yellow fever.

Just like in wartime, compulsion is a must.

Anti-slavery protest during the Missouri statehood debate.

How prior generations of Americans responded to the threat of infectious disease.

During the 1898-1904 pox epidemic, public health officials and policemen forced thousands of Americans to be vaccinated against their will.

The history of epidemics offers considerable advice, but only if people know the history and respond with wisdom.

The qualities for which live theater is celebrated—audiences responding with laughter, tears, gasps, and coughs—accelerate its danger.

A report from the site of a former concentration camp.

A history of reformers targeting sex trafficking in pursuit of other aims.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

A visit with three of the last polio survivors in the U.S. who still depend on iron lungs.

The video game offers a realistic portrayal of illness and public health in the 19th-century American West.

A schoolteacher created the popular board game, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, for quarantined children.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

The artist’s Saturday Evening Post covers championed a retrograde view of America. In the 1960s, he had a change of heart.

Jerry Mitchell revisits a dark episode in the struggle for civil rights.

A "test tube baby" grapples with the dark corners of 20th century reproductive technologies.

It has little to do with what happened in 1915, and everything to do with Cold War-era geopolitics in the Middle East.

The city sought to sell bonds to pay for the war effort, while bringing its citizens together during the infamous pandemic

19th-century Americans abandoned the English phrasing of "standing" for election and begin to describe candidates who "run" for office. The race was on.

Plan Colombia functioned like an ideological laboratory for forever war in the twenty-first century.

A century before today’s celebrity health gurus, an American businesswoman was a beauty with a brand.

Refocusing the study of the Civil War on the West shows that events out west were not simply “noteworthy”; they were emblematic.

This post is a part of our “Faith in Revolution” series, which explores the ways that religious ideologies and communities shaped the revolutionary era.

The historian Frank M. Snowden discusses the politics of restricting travel during epidemics and more.

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are the icons of an ideological split among today’s Democrats, echoing a similar split in the Republican party of 1964.

When first-term Representative Leon Sacks of Pennsylvania introduced H.R. 6546 on April 21, 1937, the Earth did not stop spinning. But it almost did.

The paper’s series on slavery made avoidable mistakes. But the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous.

How the forgotten fight for the West exposes the meaning of the Confederate flag.

The last British monarch to reign over the American colonies had a collection of more than 55,000 maps, each with their own story to tell.

A new biography and TV show present Emily Dickinson as a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.