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An painting depicting a murder ballad, with the murder happening in the background and a band playing music in the foreground.

Blood Harmony

The far-flung tale of a murder song.
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.
Black residents of Natchez, Miss., walk alongside a railroad track in August 1940.

One of the Biggest U.S. Slave Markets Finally Reckons With Its Past

Natchez, Miss., is beginning to highlight the history of its enslaved people—including at a Black-owned bed and breakfast in former slave quarters.
Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese on the set of "Killers of the Flower Moon."

How Publicity of Killers of the Flower Moon Recalls Rosebud Yellow Robe’s 1950 Hollywood Tour

On the performance of authenticity and the native stories left to tell.
Willa Cather sitting on a bench, wearing a fur scarf and feathered hat and looking at the camera

Never-Ending Nostalgia: Who and What Inspired Willa Cather

On the early years of America's chronicler of the Great Plains.
original

Borderland Stories

What we remember when we remember the Alamo.
Digitally altered portrait of a man in a suit with his face pixelated, framed by computer windows.

What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes

Experts have warned that utterly realistic A.I.-generated videos might wreak havoc through deception. What’s happened is troubling in a different way.
Statue of Paul Revere on Boston's Freedom Trail.

On the Trail—to Freedom?

Touring the palimpsests of cities.
Sparkles in light coming through windows of an empty room.

Signs of Ghosts

What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone?
Ghostly woman.

Why Are There So Many Female Ghosts?

Female ghosts seem to dominate the afterlife. Whether the spirits are real or not, the reasons for the disparity could be revealing.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Great Zimbabwe, circa 1996; photograph by Graham Smith.

Finding My Roots

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.
Asian women opera performers dressed as entertainers holding fans

A Reimagination of 'Madama Butterfly' Isn't Radical, Says Artist Phil Chan

The famed opera has been criticized for its racist portrayals of Asian-Americans.
Betty and Barney Hill praying.

From Civil Rights Liberals to New Age Conspiracy Theorists

What Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story reveals about America.
Martial arts fighting scene from Warrior.

Bruce Lee’s “Warrior,” and the Politics of Kung Fu

The Max series makes a radical argument for what constitutes American history.
J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves

Beyond Tortured Genius: Science and Conscience in Two Rediscovered Oppenheimer Films

"The Day After Trinity" and "The Strangest Dream" evacuate the mythical tropes of the tortured genius biopic that Hollywood loves to rehearse.
A scene from the “Lost Colony,” an outdoor historical drama in Manteo, N.C., in 2017.

A North Carolina Town’s Historic Play Ends Redface and Hires Native Actors

“The Lost Colony” had dramatized American mythology in the Outer Banks since 1937 with White actors as Indians. Now, Native performers are rewriting the story.
Captain Lightfood on horseback firing a pistol.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot: The American Creation of Irish Outlaw Folk Heroes

Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 
Scenes of Stephen Speilburg on set from the filming of Jaws

‘Jaws Became a Living Nightmare’: Steven Spielberg's Ultimate Tell-All Interview

“It was made under the worst of conditions,” the filmmaker reveals in a new book. “People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle.”
Covers of popular history books.

Who Is History For?

What happens when radical historians write for the public.
Shawn Huckins' painting of Thomas Jefferson with a WiFi symbol over his face, 2017.

Meet Thomas Jefferson

Portraying a 19th-century president.
Hayden White from the cover of "The Ethics of Narrative."

The Ironic Radical: On Hayden White’s “The Ethics of Narrative”

The kinds of narratives historians tend to fall back on constrain our ability to imagine alternatives to the way things have been, and to the way things are.
Andrea Casali: The Personification of History Writing on the Back of Time, early 1760s

Ego-Histories

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.
Illustration of a person reading, sitting on a giant stack of books.

Is Writing History Like Solving a Mystery?

Why historians like to think of themselves as detectives.
Cover of "Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad"  by Andrew K. Diemer

A Historian Forgotten

A new biography of William Still show how the abolitionist documented the underground railroad as he helped people through it.
Cast of the opera "Omar" on stage, with Arabic script on the stage backdrop.

‘Tell Your Story, Omar’

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.
A skeleton woman in a black dress floating in a cemetery.

The Elusive, Maddening Mystery of the Bell Witch

A classic ghost story has something to say about America—200 years ago, 100 years ago, and today.
Illustration of McCormick at his desk, hunched over a typewriter.

Hellhounds on His Trail

Mack McCormick’s long, tortured quest to find the real Robert Johnson.
Detail of faces on a family tree.

The Pocahontas Exception: America’s Ancestor Obsession

The ‘methods and collections’ of genealogists are political because they have a great deal in common with genealogy as a way of doing history.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Grappling With the Overthrow of Reconstruction

Two new books ask us to shift our attention away from the white vigilantes of Jim Crow and instead focus on what it meant for the survivors.
Composite by Hannah Yoest of images relating to the Iraq War.

Moral Injuries

Remembering what the Iraq War was like, 20 years later.

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