landscape

In a new exhibit, Winslow Homer, once seen as the oracle of the nation’s innocence, is recast as a poet of conflict.

Dreams of Central America in the era of the Erie Canal.

For nearly all of its modern existence, the Great Dismal Swamp has been excluded from U.S. history. Now there’s a push to bring its significance to light.

The Underground Railroad conductor's understanding of botany, wildlife biology, geography and astronomy allowed her to guide herself and others to safety.

"The American Scene" is Henry James’s indictment of what Americans had made of their land.

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

Photographs of empty city streets went out of fashion, but lately are coming back again. What's lost in these images of vacant streets?

An interactive virtual stroll down Flatbush Avenue circa 1914, compiled from Subway Construction photos published by the NY Historical Society.

The national parks are the closest thing America has to sacred lands, and like the frontier of old, they can help forge our democracy anew.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, Geronimo, Robert Oppenheimer, Steven Spielberg, and the mysteries of New Mexico's desert.

Deemed “the greatest landscape painter in the West,” he achieved rare fame in his day.

It’s the biggest battle on U.S. soil that most Americans have never heard of.

Documenting the New York City construction boom at the turn of the 20th century.

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

Edward Bellamy's utopia influenced a generation of urban planners.

The Kingdom of the Happy Land represents just one of many Black placemaking efforts in Appalachia. We must not forget it.

However the Little Ice Age came to be, we now know that climatic cooling had profound consequences for contemporary societies.

A look at early photography reveals the nuances of California's early development.

How the New England town became the mythical landscape of American democracy.

Susan Fenimore Cooper is now being recognized as one of the nation's first environmentalists.

For hundreds of years, Florida has had the reputation of being a little unstable.

Any critical take on public monuments today must confront the reality that public lands are themselves colonized lands.

Called Art War Relief, members from a group of art societies formed a coalition under the auspices of the American Red Cross.

How American landscape painters, seen as old-fashioned and provincial, gained cultural power by glorifying expansionism.

A detailed guide to the old stories and landscapes of New York City, published in the last year of the 19th century.

A journalist seeks to capture the "spirit" of Oak Ridge.

This film is a rare record of San Francisco's downtown area before its destruction in the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Retracing the steps of a Texan lynched in 1921 requires a trip through dark days in state history.

For Henry David Thoreau, it is only as strangers that we can see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are.

Though it may seem like a new topic of concern, the glaciated landscape of Greenland has floated in and out of American politics for decades.