Excerpts

The reflections of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration.

Meet cartography's most persistent mistake.

Richard Staff interviews four former Brooklyn Dodgers players, who, despite the team's move to Los Angeles, still identify with their Brooklyn roots.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected us in millions of ways. But it evades the meanings we want it to bear.

Mexicali’s "Colorado River Family Album" documents what is no more.

This 1994 documentary brings the passions and agonies of Mississippi’s voter-registration drive into the present tense.

Edda L. Fields-Black sets out to restore the Combahee River Raid to its proper place in Tubman’s life and in the war on slavery.

My ancestors were the good whites, or at least that’s what I’ve always wanted to believe.

How solid is the wall between church and state?

Before Theodore Roosevelt Island was transformed, a prominent Virginia family relied on enslaved laborers to build and tend to its summer home.

San Diego's city-wide mission to promote sustainability, combat climate change, and reduce environmental health disparities.

With low police morale, limited peacekeeping ability and agitated immigrants, the city only needed a match to set it ablaze.

For most of American history, Washington's Birthday was a really big deal, but that’s changed a lot since the middle of the twentieth century.

Mexico's resistance to the institution of slavery made it a land ripe for African American immigration in the 1800s.

While engagement or wedding rings are certainly not a new idea, the prevalence of diamonds is a more recent phenomenon.

While some in the West are squeamish, globally, it's more common than not.

After "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," the nightmare of American familyhood was the only game in town.

Too often, U.S. support for open navigation has devolved into military conflict.

Harriet M. Buss' missives home detail the future congressman's candid views on race and the complicity of Confederate women.

An astonishing new show of Native American ledger drawings brings a historic crime into focus.

A unique set of composite photographs by Lewis Hine depicting Southern cotton mill workers.

The President's spiritual journey transformed him and the nation.

Peanuts’ Franklin has been a controversial character for decades. A new special attempts reparations.

Americans have long tried to hold parents responsible for their children’s misdeeds—but it never really works.

The most ambitious social experiment in American history that until 1877, explicitly rejected the core values of Victorian capitalism.

The Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, an oft overlooked conflict that continues to shape the politics and culture(s) of North America.

After 40 years and more than 25 million copies sold, what story does ‘Legend’ tell us about Bob Marley and the people listening to it?

Charles Lewis Tiffany bought surplus cable from the venture, turning it into souvenirs that forever linked his name to the telecommunications milestone.

The creators of Yale’s Civil War Memorial were more concerned with honoring “both sides” than with the true meaning of the war.

Before the end of Black History Month, we should remember some of the leaders who shaped the movement in the years before Roe v. Wade.

Journalist, civil rights activist and suffragist, she dedicated her life to documenting injustices against Black Americans and calling for change.

As he told a friend years later, "the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips."

A Californian politician's disastrous expedition to seize Mexican land, and how newspapers spun the story.

These images of the LA Alligator Farm depict a level of casual proximity unthinkable today.

In its 90th year, the radical peace movement is reinvigorating itself by going hyper-local.

His research ushered in the psychedelic renaissance. Now it's changing how he's facing death.

How San Francisco's Chinatown community used infrastructure as a conduit for identity, empowerment, and resilience.

Zine-making is a tradition shared by the young and alienated, people enamored with the fringes of culture. Can a museum exhibit capture its essence?

Southern Baptists were seeking a religion of the heart, and in Edwards they discovered a trove of treatises, biographies, and sermons on Christian spirituality.

Breaking down the myths of originalism and America's founding.

The old Midwest was a place animated by the belief that a self-governing republic is the best regime for man.

A visual journalist remembers a time when "housing was more flexible, fluid and communal than it is today.”

The long history of benevolence, self-help, and parades in New Orleans.

A look at "Biography Of A Phantom", Robert McCormick's book about blues legend Robert Johnson.

The recent history of copyright in music cannot be separated from the rise of technologies for the recording and transmission of content online.

A conversation with Erika Marie Bsumek about one of the worst boondoggles in the Southwest.

Feminist. Preacher. Abolitionist. Civil rights pioneer. Now the full story of the American icon's life and faith is finally coming to light.

Three years later, amid another national election, the American public is still slow to understand the enormity of January 6, 2021.

Tracking the history of a curious scientific term.

Neither side of the border has seen the benefits it was promised.