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Remembered for the Wrong Reason?

Which personality of the American Revolution or the founding era is remembered for the wrong reasons, and why?
Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.
Pocahontas characters overlaid onto a landscape.

Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.
Alfred Hitchcock directing

The Haunted Imagination of Alfred Hitchcock

How the master of suspense got his sadistic streak.
Black-and-white photograph of Louis Agassiz sitting in chair, looking through a magnifying glass at a sea urchin.

Louis Agassiz, Under a Microscope

The two prevailing historical visions of Louis Agassiz — one gentle and reverential, the other rigid and bigoted — may simply be two sides of the same coin.
Alex Trebek at the Jeopardy host stand.

An Oral History of How Alex Trebek Became America’s Most Beloved Game-Show Host

Four decades of “Jeopardy!” contestants tell the story of Alex Trebek’s rise from affable Canadian TV host to cultural icon.

‘Anyone Ever Seen Cocaine?’ What We Found in the Archives of Bernie Sanders’s TV Show.

What a forgotten trove of videotapes reveals about the man who rewrote America’s political script.

How Cults Made America

A new book argues that, politically, messianic movements were often light-years ahead of their time. But at what cost?

How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success

With “The Apprentice,” the TV producer mythologized Trump as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency.
Malcolm X.

The Missing Malcolm X

Our understanding of Malcolm X is inextricably linked to his autobiography, but newly discovered materials force us to reexamine his legacy.

Trumpism Is the New McCarthyism

Just as as McCarthyism did decades ago, Trumpism conceals the Republican Party’s long-term program to dismantle the public sector.
Parents with four daughters.

Parenting for the “Rough Places” in Antebellum America

Jane Sedgwick’s evolving ideas about her children’s natures and her ability to shape them reflected an emerging American skepticism of the perfectibility.

What Cheer, Though?

Joyce Chaplin on the malevolence of American goodwill.

Nikola Tesla: The Extraordinary Life of a Modern Prometheus

Tesla created inventions that continue to alter our daily lives, but he died nearly penniless.

‘Who Goes Nazi’ Now?

Dorothy Thompson's 1941 paranoid 'parlor game' just as (un) useful today.

What Does Trump's Golfing Reveal about His Personality?

Donald Trump has been playing a lot of golf since becoming president. Can his habit be explained by his "sky-high extroversion?"

Donald Trump and the 'Paranoid Style' in American (Intellectual) Politics

Revisiting Holfstadter's "paranoid style" in the era of Trump.
Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Power of a Portrait

Edgar Allan Poe knew that readers would add their visual image of the author to his work to create a personality that informed their reading.

How Televising Presidential Debates Changed Everything

Ever since Kennedy-Nixon, televised debates have given viewers an insight into candidates' policies—and their personalities, too.
Dave Prater and two others

You Don't Know What You Mean To Me

Who was Dave Prater?
Part of a portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner

The Scandalous Legacy of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Collector of Art and Men

Long before the gallery she built was famously robbed, Isabella Stewart Gardner was shocking 19th-century society with her disregard for convention.
Edgar Allan Poe

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares are prominent in Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

The True Story of Phineas Gage Is Much More Fascinating Than the Mythical Textbook Accounts

Each generation revises his myth. Here’s the true story.
Photo of Laura Bridgman wearing opaque eyeglasses.

The Education of Laura Bridgman

She was Helen Keller before Helen Keller. Then her mentor abandoned their studies.
Brigham Young

The Reds Under Romney’s Bed

The most ambitious social experiment in American history that until 1877, explicitly rejected the core values of Victorian capitalism.

LBJ Orders Pants

You will never think about the 36th president the same way again.
Drawings of George Washington

His Highness

George Washington scales new heights.
Theodore Roosevelt in three energetic poses.

The Performer

The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and his creation of the modern "performer" president.
Woman hanging a poster of Hitler with a string of Nazi flags above it.

Who Goes Nazi?

The view from 1941.
John Brown

Three Interviews With Old John Brown

Atlantic writer William Phillips conducted three interviews with Brown before Brown's fateful raid on Harper's Ferry.

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