Excerpts

The humble drinking fountain can tell us much about a society’s attitudes towards health, hygiene, equity, virtue, public goods and civic responsibilities.

The US is not Yugoslavia, but its struggles surrounding pluralism, nationalism, and an urban/rural divide parallel those Yugoslavia faced as it descended into chaos.

A new interactive digital project recovers biographies of women in science, and recreates the social networks that were essential to sustaining their work.

Descendants of the west Africans who picked the cotton that made Manchester rich are struggling to keep their distinct culture alive.

When the smoke cleared in D.C. following the 1968 riots after the assasination of MLK, the city's black communities organized to rebuild a more equitable city.

Proposal advice from Inez Milholland, originally published in the Chicago Day Book, 1916.

This syllabus lays groundwork for making questions of race and racism central to studying the histories of medicine and science.

A sharp uptick in challenges to U.S. antidiscrimination laws threatens decades of progress in extending civil rights to all.

Union soldiers improvised a Passover celebration near what's now Fayetteville, W.Va. They're being honored with a sign at the approximate site.

The rash ruse was central to Nixon’s strategy to fight the Cold War, and can also tell us a good deal about the famously elusive ex-president himself.

Lacy M. Johnson walks through a nature center near Houston that has reclaimed the land where a neighborhood, sunken by oil extraction and floodwater, once stood.

How a struggling entrepreneur in Ohio saved his burger business during Lent and changed the McDonald's menu for good.

Hint: the Puritans were involved.

How Robert Segovia used steelworkers and the Catholic Church to build a political machine in Chicago.

A teenage girl died by suicide after she started menstruating and not knowing what it was, in 1935. A bill in Florida wants to take us back to those times.

Competition over eggs on the Farallon Islands in the midst of the California Gold Rush in San Francisco led to an all out war between eggers.

The fortunes of Coney Island have waxed and waned, but in the early twentieth century, its amusement parks became a major American export.

Dean Calbreath’s biography, “The Sergeant,” relates the improbable adventures of a brilliant 19th-century Black man.

From Hemingway to Mencken, no one thought a woman could write about combat.

On the enormous, ornate, and extremely impractical bathtub in his family’s old-fashioned brownstone home.

The history—and danger—of a modern safety obsession.

The selling of the Iraq war.

As modern lawmakers consider various means of public assistance for local news, they can learn from the founders’ approach to supporting journals and gazettes.

Because most tales and treatises about this near-cliché of midlife crisis center on men, you might be misled to think they have nothing to do with women’s lives.

Historian Adam Lee Cilli effectively illustrates the centrality of Black Pittsburgh within the larger Black Freedom Struggle.

Many Americans who advocate it have little interest in religion and an aversion to American culture as it currently exists. What really defines the movement?

Popular narratives say that black veterans got no real benefits from the GI Bill. In truth, the GI Bill provided a rare positive experience with government.

Lynn Riggs wrote the play that served as the basis of the hit 1943 musical.

Through six decades, gunmakers and advertisers leveraged social and cultural changes to broaden the AR-15′s appeal.

Rustin’s assessment of the lay of the political land was predicated on a no-nonsense understanding of the radicalism of the moment.

How the moons of Mars and the death of a president altered the late nineteenth-century Washington, DC, landscape.

The sacrifice of Captain Noah Grant, during the French and Indian War, may have influenced Ulysses S. Grant, as he decided to rejoin the U.S. Army in 1861.

The inventor, who baked the first batch of the iconic gum 40 years ago, talks about the genesis of an American rite of passage.

Infrastructural projects should be understood in terms of whose lives they make more livable—and the futures they enable or foreclose.

The foundational document was flawed from the start.

The waterway opened up the heartland to trade, transforming small hamlets into industrial centers.

President Warren G. Harding paid not one, but two women to remain quiet about their affairs with him.

Can it be produced without controversy?

Taking up arms against slavery, the famous novelist foreshadowed the vexed role of the white woman activist today.

The first women to serve in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps helped improve military medicine and expand women’s opportunities to officially serve in the armed forces.

The tensions between the Manhattan District Attorney and President George H.W. Bush.

This demonym will allow other Englishers to be recognized for their own locales.

The ‘methods and collections’ of genealogists are political because they have a great deal in common with genealogy as a way of doing history.

Almost a century before mixing martial arts became popularized, the 26th President was boxing, wrestling, and training judo in the White House.

How Cesar Chavez married faith and ideology in his landmark farmworkers' march.

In the 1830s, they brought lemons, commercial dynamism, and a willingness to fight elites.

Four changes are especially important when we try to measure changes in the poverty rate since 1964.

The demand of antislavery activists for accused fugitives to be guaranteed a jury trial was an implicit recognition of Black citizenship.

The hidden history of Utopian Socialism and its close relationship with cultures of esoteric spirituality in the nineteenth-century United States. 

How urban planners and suburban shoppers responded when “the storage of dead vehicles on roadways” became a nuisance to street users.