holidays

January 2017's Women's March wasn't the first time Fifth Avenue in New York City hosted an enormous demonstration.

Why Pilgrims would be stunned by our "traditional" Thanksgiving table, and other surprising truths about the invention of our national holiday.

Americans purchase approximately 1.6 billion holiday cards a year. Why is this tradition so popular?

The menu of Emancipation Day

The holiday emerged not from the 17th century, but rather from concerns over immigration and urbanization in the 19th century.

Remembering the radical past of a day now devoted to picnics and back-to-school sales.

We're supposed to celebrate one of the weirdest artifacts of the Cold War.

Firecrackers are essentially un-American, even though we associate them with our most deeply patriotic celebration, the Fourth of July.

John Adams would not be happy to see what Independence Day has become.

The great bonfires of Gallows Hill—and what they tell us about America.

A conversation with food historian Andrew F. Smith on his new book, "The Turkey: An American Story."

America’s ambivalence about labor is nothing new. In the colonial era the ruling class had nothing but contempt for anything that could be justly called "work."

Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?

Since colonial times, the Book of Esther has proved a powerful metaphor in American politics.

Marine archaeologists are beginning to understand what really happened to Captain Santa's ill-fated ship, nicknamed the Christmas Tree Boat.

See how Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore and Thomas Nast made Santa the merriest man in Manhattan.

What were Americans' immediate responses to "A Christmas Carol," and how did Dickens' reading tours and eventual death reshape its meaning?

A companion to a new PBS film, "The Memorial Day Massacre," the first oral history exploring the murder of 10 workers in Chicago.

Ever since the execution of labor radicals in 1886, reactionaries have tried to tarnish their legacy — and leftists have honored them as working-class martyrs.

Georgia’s competitive runoff election is the result of centuries of white supremacist efforts.