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A painting of a group of Puritans walking through a snowy forest, with the men carrying rifles.

The Puritans Were Book Banners, But They Weren’t Sexless Sourpusses

From early New England to the present day, censors have acted out of fear, not prudishness.
Author Sanora Babb, with her husband James Wong Howe, in their library.

The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression

John Steinbeck based “The Grapes of Wrath” on Sanora Babb’s notes. But she was writing her own American epic.
Two newspaper workers flip a first proof of a page off the printing press at the offices of the Daily Mail, 1944.
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Perhaps the Most Influential Single Propagandist for Fascism

On the lengths newspaper publishers took to reach new subscribers — and then drive them away — in the 1930s.
Black and white photo of Boston’s Old Corner bookstore (1900).

Bookselling Out

“The Bookshop” tells the story of American bookstores in thirteen types. Its true subject is not how bookstore can survive, but how they should be.
Empty speech bubbles emanating from people in an old house.

Popular History

What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?
The silhouette of a colonial American man overlayed on the front page of Publick Occurrences.

Why the Debut Issue of America’s First Newspaper Was Also the Publication’s Last

The paper angered colonial officials by repeating a scandalous rumor and condemning a British alliance with the Mohawk.

Read Another Book

The Power Broker leaves us ill-equipped to understand or confront the struggles that face the city today.
Assyrian relief depicting person holding bread.

On Recipes: Changing Formats, Changing Use

Wayfinding through history and design of the cookbook.
Miniature city dwellers at the foot of a row of cookbooks.

Bonnie Slotnick, the Downtown Food-History Savant

In the forty-eight years that she’s lived in the West Village, the owner of the iconic cookbook shop has never ordered delivery.
James Baldwin

Racism, Jazz, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny Blues”

Baldwin wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve.
Cover of "James" by Percival Everett.

Kierkegaard on the Mississippi 

Percival Everett refashions a Mark Twain classic.
Misery and Fortune of Women (1930).

The Lost Abortion Plot

Power and choice in the 1930s novel.
Art installation of cardboard pieces with the Amazon arrow logo, arranged in the shape of a cresting wave.

World in a Box: Cardboard Media and the Geographic Imagination

Cardboard boxes hold a world of meaning that spans from Amazon to the Container Corporation of America.
Map of the United States of America.

Remembering John Hope Franklin, OAH’s First Black President

The 2024 OAH Conference on American History falls almost fifteen years after the renowned historian, teacher, and activist's death.

The Great American Novels

136 books that made America think.
Book cover of: 'Through a Grid, Darkly: On Anna Shechtman’s “The Riddles of the Sphinx,”' in red lettering

Through a Grid, Darkly

The feminist history of the crossword puzzle: some of the form's early champions were women working for little to no pay.
Books, diaries and poetry collections from the Issei Poetry Project.

Issei Poetry Between the World Wars

The rich history of Japanese-language literature challenges assumptions about what counts as U.S. art.
Woman creating a "zine", using a presumably Xerox photocopy machine.

American Counterculture, Glimpsed Through Zines

Zine-making is a tradition shared by the young and alienated, people enamored with the fringes of culture. Can a museum exhibit capture its essence?
Image from the filmstrip, showing a grieved woman with her head in her hands, being comforted by a man standing beside her

Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Hands of the Red Scared

Again and again, a fervant British anticommunist's filmstrip of the novel shows images of women in states of distress.
original

Best History Writing of 2023

We reviewed thousands of articles, essays, and blog posts last year. Here are some of our favorites.
Bottom half of a red sheet music cover with the words "Sung by Aida Overton Walker with the Smart Set Co" written on it with a portrait of Aida to the right

Sheet Music Covers for the Gotham-Attucks Company, ca. 1905–1911

Beginning in 1905, one star-studded song-publishing company would push the aesthetic limits of how Black popular music was shown to the public.
Parental advisory sticker warning of explicit content.
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Who Gets to Regulate #*%&? Free Speech in Popular Culture

When speech offends, who decides where boundaries should be drawn?
Black and white portrait of Jones Very

The Voice of Unfiltered Spirit

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.
A pink, fluffy cloud raining colorful cubes, reminiscent of pieces of data.

What Do We Owe? Generosity, Attribution, and the Perilous Invisibility of Research Infrastructure

Attribution can make visible the vast infrastructure of research and display how much hard-won knowledge, including creative endeavor, it has faciliated.
The Confederate States Almanac

On Harvests and Histories

Almanacs from the Civil War era reveal how two sides of an embattled nation used data from the natural world to legitimize their claims to statehood.
Margaretta Hare Morris.

The Mischievous Morris Sisters

Two gifted sisters in Philadelphia helped to transform early American science.

Slavery and the Journal — Reckoning with History and Complicity

Reexamining biases and injustices that the New England Journal of Medicine has historically helped to perpetuate.
Painting by Pablo Ventura called "War Souvenirs #9" depicting a soldier kissing a woman, another with a bicycle, and World War II propaganda posters.

Writing Under Fire

For a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.
The cult-like aesthetic of technocracy, 1942.

Margaret Mead, Technocracy, and the Origins of AI's Ideological Divide

The anthropologist helped popularize both techno-optimism and the concept of existential risk.
A collage of images of Henry Ford and newspaper articles about him.

America’s Most Dangerous Anti-Jewish Propagandist

Making sense of anti-Semitism today requires examining Henry Ford’s outsize part in its origins.

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