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Henry James; illustration by James McMullan

Visions of Waste

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

The Danger of a Single Origin Story

The 1619 Project and contested foundings.
Line of forest fire volunteers in Siberia

A Deranged Pyroscape: How Fires Across the World Have Grown Weirder

Fewer fires are burning worldwide than at any time since antiquity. But in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable.
Drawing of a dying tree. The tree is losing its needles and the trunk is frayed.

The Tallest Known Tree in New York Falls in the Forest

The white pine known as Tree 103 had lost the dewy glow that it had back in 1675.
Group of child laborers

The Age of the Birth Certificate

When states began restricting labor by children, verifying a person's age became an important means of enforcement.
Vintage drawing of a rural area with snowfall. In the foreground, two horses are pulling a man in a cart on the snowy road.

Cox’s Snow and the Persistence of Weather Memory

One of the worst snowstorms recorded in Virginia’s history began on Sunday, January 17, 1857. It remained in Virginians' collective memories eighty years later.

How Hobbies Infiltrated American Life

America has a love affair with “productive leisure.”
A woman giving a presentation about electric appliances to an audience of men and women.

Refrigerators and Women’s Empowerment

The “peaceful revolution” of rural electrification.
Marian Anderson looking downwards

Marian Anderson’s Bone-Chilling Rendition of “Crucifixion”

Her performances of the Black spiritual in the nineteen-thirties caused American and European audiences to fall silent in awe.
Middle finger that says "Millenial" and Fist that says "Gen Z"

It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

From boomers to zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.
FDR signing a bill

That Time America Almost Had a 30-Hour Workweek

A six-hour workday could have become the national standard during the Great Depression. Here's the story of why that didn't happen.
Art sculpture "House" by Rachael Whiteread, 1993 (a concrete casting of the inside of a Victorian house).

Monuments for the Interim Twenty-Four Thousand Years.

An account of the long-lasting effects of nuclear energy in the US.
Picture of Beer and Brewing before prohibition.

America’s Founding Lagers: The Pre-Prohibition Landscape

There were Munich-style dark lagers, American bocks, and paler, pilsner-like beers.
A diagram of the phases of the Moon.

Man-Bat and Raven: Poe on the Moon

A new book recovers the reputation Poe had in his own lifetime of being a cross between a science writer, a poet, and a man of letters.
Medical men wearing masks at a US Army hospital

Why Do We Forget Pandemics?

Until the Covid-19 pandemic, the catastrophe of the Spanish flu had been dropped from American memory.
Rev. Timothy McDonald III in First Iconium Baptist Church
partner

Attacking Sunday Voting is Part of a Long Tradition of Controlling Black Americans

The centuries-long battle over Sunday activities is really about African Americans' freedom and agency.
Illustration of a 1920s party in a martini glass

On Imagining Gatsby Before Gatsby

How a personal connection to Nick Carraway inspired the author to write the novel "Nick."
Abstract design in which adults and children are isolated from each other using computers and tablets, floating near a raised Black fist, a mask, and a TV camera.

Apocalypse Then and Now

A dispatch from Wounded Knee that layers the realities of poverty, climate change, and resilience on the history of colonization, settlement, and genocide.

This is an Experiment About How We View History

How does color influence our perception of time?
Person holding suitcase at gas station with other person in background

Night Terrors

The creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’ dramatized isolation and fear but still believed in the best of humanity.
A car being made in a car factory

Talking About Auto Work Means Talking About Constant, Brutal Violence

It's remembered as one of the best industrial jobs a worker could get in postwar America. Less remembered is how brutal life on the factory floor was – and still is.

YouTubers are Upscaling the Past to 4K. Historians Want Them to Stop.

YouTubers are using AI to bring history to life. But historians argue the process is nonsense.
Geological map of winding river paths creating an intricate swirling pattern

Harold Fisk’s Meander Maps of the Mississippi River

A geologist and cartographer dreamed up a captivating, colorful, visually succinct way of representing the river's fluctuations through space and time.
Harry Sternberg’s 1947 visualization of fascism as a three-headed monster.

What We Don’t Understand About Fascism

Using the word incorrectly oversimplifies history—and won't help us address our current political crisis.

How Aztecs Told History

For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices.

On the Uses of History for Staying Alive

Reflections on reading Nietzsche in Alaska in the early days of Covid-19.

The Planet is Burning Around us: Is it Time to Declare the Pyrocene?

Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene?
multicolor illustration of Gmail icons, iMessage text boxes, reply arrows, and refresh arrows.

Was E-mail a Mistake?

Digital messaging was supposed to make our work lives easier and more efficient, but the math suggests that meetings might be better.
Art installation, "Public Soil Memory for the Plantationocene" at the Sandy Spring Museum

How the Soil Remembers Plantation Slavery

What haunts the land? When two artists dig up the tangled history of slavery and soil exhaustion in Maryland, soil memory reveals ongoing racial violence.

Vessel of Antiquity

Influence, invention, and the legacy of Leon Redbone.

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