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Celery.

The Secret History of Celery

How the crunchy stalks went from Victorian centerpiece to ubiquitous football snack.
by Robert F. Moss via Epicurious on December 22, 2022
Employees of print shop

Who Owns the Narrative? Texas Law Enforcement Versus Tejano Journalists

At the turn of the century, Mexican American publications paid a price for challenging the local sheriff and elements of the Texas Rangers.
by Isabella Van Trease via Texas Monthly on December 1, 2022
Engraving of an attempt to start a freight train, under a guard of U.S. marshals during the great railway strike of 1886.

Historians' Letter to President Biden About Looming Railroad Strike

More than 500 historians signed onto this letter of support for the demands of railway workers.
on November 30, 2022
A portrait of Joe Hill.

Joe Hill Was Killed for Singing Labor’s Song

The labor troubadour Joe Hill was executed by a Utah firing squad for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit.
by Cal Winslow via Jacobin on November 19, 2022
Picture of a gas pump.
partner

High Transportation Costs Limit Mobility, Fueling Inequality

The absence of robust transportation infrastructure hurts us — and not only at the gas pump.
by Yong Kwon via Made By History on November 14, 2022
original

Tidying Up the Past

A history tour at Harper’s Ferry suggests that “commemoration” and “desecration” might be two sides of the same coin.
by Ed Ayers on October 12, 2022
original

Our Flag Was Still There

How is the first half of the 19th century depicted in and around the nation’s capital? Ed Ayers hits the road to find out.
by Ed Ayers on July 19, 2022
Illustration of a coal stove with the roof of a house, as if the whole house is a furnace.

When Coal First Arrived, Americans Said 'No Thanks'

Back in the 19th century, coal was the nation's newfangled fuel source—and it faced the same resistance as wind and solar today.
by Clive Thompson via Smithsonian on July 5, 2022
Whole Wheat Shell Pasta on Grey, by artist Rachel Doom, 2019.

Wielding Wheat

A new history makes a case for the world-ordering power of wheat.
by Daniel Immerwahr via New York Review of Books on July 1, 2022
Flooding in Livingston, Montana, with Yellowstone National Park mountains in the background.

What Extreme Flooding in Yellowstone Means for the National Park's Gateway Towns

These communities rely almost entirely on tourism for their existence—yet too much tourism, not to mention climate change, can destroy them.
by Megan Kate Nelson via Smithsonian on June 16, 2022
Photo of Sitting Bull with an aerial view of the Yellowstone Basin in the background.

How Sitting Bull's Fight for Indigenous Land Rights Shaped the Creation of Yellowstone National Park

The 1872 act that established the nature preserve provoked Lakota assertions of sovereignty.
by Megan Kate Nelson via Smithsonian on March 1, 2022
Magazine illustration depicting fantastical inventions for travel on water, land, and air, titled March of Intellect, by William Heath, c. 1828.

A Utopia of Useful Things

On the nineteenth-century artists and thinkers who pictured a future of abundance powered by steam.
by Michael Rawson via Lapham’s Quarterly on December 24, 2021
Photograph of Robert Moses on a background collage of a blueprint and a photo of passengers waiting in Penn Station.

Robert Moses Helped Ruin Penn Station. He'd Have Made it Easier to Fix, Too.

Preservationists like Jane Jacobs are urbanist heroes. But their rules can stifle.
by Samuel Goldman via The Week on December 10, 2021
Photograph of a dilapidated mall from the rear parking lot.

Mallstalgia

Once derided as cesspools of Reagan-era consumerist excess, the shopping mall somehow became an unlikely sort-of quasi-public space that is now disappearing.
by Jason Tebbe via Tropics of Meta on November 29, 2021
Futuristic representation of housing in Oakland

Untimely Futures

In Oakland, California, when it comes to Black homelessness and dispossession, dystopia is already here.
by Brandi T. Summers via Places Journal on November 1, 2021
Unaccompanied children in a train station

Novel Transport

The anatomy of the “orphan train” genre.
by Kristen Martin via Lapham’s Quarterly on November 1, 2021
Picture of intersections

What Infrastructure Really Means

Making sense of current fights over a word we borrowed from the French long ago.
by Peter A. Shulman via The Atlantic on July 13, 2021
Illustration of separated city buildings surrounding a globe embedded in the ground.

Reconstruction Finance

Popular politics and reconstructing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
by Nic Johnson via Phenomenal World on April 28, 2021
A map of the eastern US, with a line from Washington DC to St. Louis.

The Ill-Fated Idea to Move the Nation's Capital to St. Louis

In the years after the Civil War, some wanted a new seat of government that would be closer to the geographic center of a growing nation.
by Livia Gershon via Smithsonian on April 22, 2021
Segregated airport terminal

What It Was Like to Fly as a Black Traveler in the Jim Crow Era

Airlines sometimes bumped Black passengers off of flights to make room for white travelers, even during refueling stops.
by Mia Bay via Condé Nast Traveler on March 23, 2021
Collage of FSA and OWI photographs
partner

Photogrammar

A web-based visualization platform for exploring the 170,000 photos taken by U.S. government agencies during the Great Depression.
by Lauren Tilton, Taylor Arnold via American Panorama on February 10, 2021
Two women sitting on a rocking chair in a nineteenth century photograph

Postures of Transport: Sex, God, and Rocking Chairs

What if chairs could shift our state of consciousness, transporting the imagination into distant landscapes and ecstatic experiences, both religious and erotic?
by Hunter Dukes via The Public Domain Review on February 3, 2021
Skiers queuing to get on The Dollar lift.

How a Railroad Engineer From Nebraska Invented the World's First Ski Chairlift

The device was part of an elaborate plan on behalf of Union Pacific to boost passenger rail travel in the American West.
by Sarah Kuta via Smithsonian on February 2, 2021
Collage of maps representative of the project
partner

Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South 1790-2020

The maps embrace everyone —free and enslaved, from the first national census of the late 18th century to the sophisticated surveys of the early 21st century.
by Ed Ayers, Justin Madron, Nathaniel Ayers via American Panorama on January 1, 2021
Freight train traveling through grasslands.

Forty Years After Surface Freight Deregulation

The regulatory reforms of the railroad and trucking industries are models for evidence-based, bipartisan policymaking.
by Jerry Ellig via The Regulatory Review on December 14, 2020
Horses standing next to a car.

What Extremely Muscular Horses Teach Us About Climate Change

You can’t understand the history of American energy use without them. A new visual history puts them in context.
by Robinson Meyer via The Atlantic on December 8, 2020
Drawings of houses

How Trees Made Us Human

More than iron, stone, or oil, wood explains human history.
by Daniel Immerwahr via The New Republic on December 1, 2020
Visualization of documented visitation networks among reservations placed onto a map made in 1890.

Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance

A digital companion to "We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us," telling the story of Native American resistance to forced resettlement on reservations.
by Justin Gage via nativeamericannetworks.com on October 8, 2020
Charles Milton Bell, Apsáalooke Delegation, 1880.

Apsáalooke Bacheeítuuk in Washington, DC

A case study in re-reading nineteenth-century delegation photography.
by Wendy Red Star, Shannon Vittoria via Panorama on October 1, 2020
A parking lot taking up an entire city block in Downtown Denver, Colorado.

From Chaos to Order: A Brief Cultural History of the Parking Lot

How urban planners and suburban shoppers responded when “the storage of dead vehicles on roadways” became a nuisance to street users.
by Eran Ben-Joseph via The MIT Press Reader on September 3, 2020
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