tradition

Why Pilgrims would be stunned by our "traditional" Thanksgiving table, and other surprising truths about the invention of our national holiday.

Americans purchase approximately 1.6 billion holiday cards a year. Why is this tradition so popular?

19th century Hawai‘i attracted traders, entrepreneurs, and capitalists, who displaced, a flourishing and elaborate culture.

The menu of Emancipation Day.

Coleman’s approach to improvisation shook twentieth-century jazz. It was a revolutionary idea that sounded like a folk song.

As Buffalo Bill's performers, they were walking stereotypes. But a New York photographer showed the humans beneath the headdresses.

Historians are losing their audience, and searching for the next trend won’t win it back.

If you think that the banjo can teach us nothing about American history, Southern culture and modern race relations, then you certainly don't know the banjo.

Tracing the evolution of Christmas from a drunken carnival to the peaceful, family-oriented, consumeristic ritual we celebrate today.

The holiday emerged not from the 17th century, but rather from concerns over immigration and urbanization in the 19th century.

How the entire U.S. came to drink out of a vessel never meant for human lips.

Our horror of chemical agents is one of the great success stories of modern diplomacy.

A path to freedom for enslaved blacks, an engine of economic independence, a treat for Mardi Gras revelers.

An hour of stories about a few high-stakes inaugurations from the past.

The great bonfires of Gallows Hill—and what they tell us about America.

There once was a time when Yom Kippur was a time to eat, drink, and be merry.

A response to claims that the First Thanksgiving was not a "thanksgiving" as the Pilgrims understood it.

For the English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.

At the founding of America, leaders predicted that a concentration of wealth would weaken the republic.

How 13 colonies came together.

On memory, erasure, and the return of indigenous presence.

From Jim Crow-era performance to contemporary gospel musicals, entertainers have shaped the Black public sphere.

Today no one on either side of the political spectrum would present themselves as an enemy of choice. Sophia Rosenfeld exposes the complex legacy of this idea.

How endless options became our only option.

When the Kamala Harris endorsement was spiked, the publisher cited tradition. A closer reading of history tells a different story.

A new book questions what we think we know about heterosexuality and Latter-day Saints, or Mormons.

Jonathan Gienapp's attack on originalism deserves a serious response.

Construction workers pooled their wages to erect the first one. Their bosses co-opted the gesture, transforming it into today’s consumer spectacle.

On the medallic art of the Gilded Age.

We see what we want to see from philosophers such as Locke not because he wrote for our time (or “all time”) but because we imagine he did.