generations

Rewriting the history and future of an iconic suburb.

A bold new photographic project asks modern-day Americans to recreate portraits of their 19th-century ancestors in painstakingly accurate fashion.

The Icarians thought they could build a paradise, but their project was marked by failure almost from the start.

Often dismissed as a “trash fish,” the porgy is an anchor of Black maritime culture.

"African Founders" corrects some of the ideological uses of Black American history.

Two family histories by Americans connected to Europe’s twentieth century through their fascist grandfathers seek to occupy the void between history and memory.

Anthem for a forgotten cohort.

An in-depth look at horse breeding.

On the complex history of “passing” in America.

A generation is still dying younger than it should—this time, of “natural causes.”

For members of the Hip Hop generation who came of age during the Black Power era, “reality rap” was an entry into the political power of Black history.

The turn-of-the-century literary canon, using data from college syllabi.

We're born with a hunger for connection with our ancestors – both biological and spiritual.

On the importance of material ownership in the context of Black history.

The defining boundaries and problematic categorizations carried by our culture's treatment of the label "millennial."

Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan on the data illusion of the rags-to-riches stories.

The Lehman Trilogy proposes that the downfall of a financial dynasty is enough to tell the economic and political history of America.

She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?

The poet’s memoir Generations is both a chronicle of her ancestral lineage and lesson in the centrality of Black women to the story of American history.

Early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years.

A century of tax avoidance later, the dynasties created in the 1900s are going strong.

Which songs will future generations use to characterize the decade?

A Pulitzer historian assesses what we are to make of UVA’s founder, 200 years hence.

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

They have shaped America, but how old were they on Independence Day?

Forty years ago, Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff, and a whole host of Texas misfits brought the hippies and rednecks together in outlaw country.

America’s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media.

If we imagine religion as a technology, argues Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, we can better see the cause of its decline: obsolescence.

Survivors of the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still fighting for recognition.

The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping their memories alive.