steamboats

Already prone to boiler explosions that regularly killed scores of passengers, steamboats were pushed to their limits in races that valued speed over safety.

“Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing…” — James Joyce, Ulysses

On April 27, 1865, a steamboat named the Sultana exploded and an estimated 1,800 people died, but few today have heard of this disaster.

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

The culture of calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood.

Rising on the lands of an ancient agricultural system, Memphis has a long history of negotiating social conflict and change while singing the blues.

The story of how Harriet Tubman led 150 African American soldiers to rescue over 700 former slaves freed five months earlier by the Emancipation Proclamation.

In the streets of New York, we try to imagine the city as Walt Whitman, and other artists of his time, experienced it.

An unprepossessing townhouse in the East Village has been central to a series of distinctive events in New York City history.

The economic transformations wrought by industrial capitalism in the 1820s and 30s look different when viewed up close.

A new look at detailed data about Civil War skirmishes along the Mississippi River reveals another key to the Union's victory.

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

American bureaucracy's long and useful history.