Indigenous people

We often associate dance with art and performance, but it is also a way that humans document, interpret, and create history.

Fewer fires are burning worldwide than at any time since antiquity. But in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable.

Fire is a planetary feature, not a biotic bug. What can we learn from Yosemite’s experiment to restore natural fire?

Archaeology and genetics keep rewriting the ancient peopling of the Americas.

On the roads and seas miners traveled to reach gold in the United States and Australia.

If we accept that we live in a desert nation, we can glean insights about how to live with aridity.

In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue. John Tresch guides us along this strange trip southward.

The transformation of tobacco and cannabis into early modern global obsessions.

The swift, often comfortable ride on the Transcontinental Railroad opened up the American West to new settlement.

Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel?

The Sierra Club's executive director takes a hard look at the white supremacy baked into the organization's formative years.

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.

A graphic essay about the brutal toll taken by the epidemic on indigenous communities in Alaska.

Like everything else in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, American food has become almost unrecognizable overnight.

Visiting the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

A story of quarantine.

Border wall construction is encroaching on a site where people from many cultures have interacted for thousands of years.

Indian boarding schools held Native American youth hostage in exchange for land cessions.

Hundreds of ancient Native American sites along the Gulf Coast are at risk.

A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?