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Mementos of a Forgotten Frontier

The black pioneers who tried to start over out west.

Pregnant Pioneers

For the frontier women of the 19th century, the experience of childbirth was harrowing, and even just expressing fear was considered a privilege.
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One of the 19th Century’s Most Important Documents Was Recently Discovered

How a rare copy of the U.S.-Navajo Treaty, once thought lost, was found in a New England attic.

The Gods of Indian Country

How American expansion reshaped the religious worlds of both settlers and Native people.

Remembering Native American Lynching Victims

Research shows that many more Native Americans were lynched than previously believed.

From Progress to Poverty: America’s Long Gilded Age

The America that emerged out of the Civil War was meant to be a radically more equal place. What went wrong?

Statues Offensive To Native Americans Are Poised To Topple Across The U.S.

No other city has taken down a monument to a president for his misdeeds, but Arcata is poised to do just that with a statue of William McKinley.

Bang for the Buck

Three new books paint a more nuanced portrait of the American militias whose gun rights have been protected since the founding.

How White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest's Mysterious Mounds

Pioneers and early archeologists preferred to credit distant civilizations, not Native Americans, with building these cities.
U.S. government medical marijuana crop at University of Mississippi.
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Jeff Sessions is a Hypocrite on States’ Rights. But So is Everyone Else.

Champions of states' rights love federal power when it suits their goals — like Sessions's anti-marijuana crusade.
Albert B. Fall swears in as Interior Secretary in 1921.

Reckoning with History: Interior’s Legacy of Bad Behavior

Ryan Zinke isn’t the first Interior secretary to attract controversy.

Statues, National Monuments, and Settler-Colonialism

Connections between public history and policy in the wake of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Civil War rifles mounted on wall

The Brutal Origins of Gun Rights

A new history argues that the Second Amendment was intended to perpetuate white settlers' violence toward Native Americans.
The rebuilt Blennerhassett mansion.

Paradise Lost

Aaron Burr spoke of far-flung fortune, and then the Blennerhassetts’ West Virginia Eden went up in flames.
Caroline and Charles Ingalls

Little House, Small Government

How Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier vision of freedom and survival lives on in Trump’s America.

Old West Theme Parks Paint a False Picture of Pioneer California

As the nation debates monuments and public memory, it’s important to understand how other cultural sites help people learn (false) history.

Hawks vs. Doves — Which Side Would the Founding Fathers Have Taken?

Expansionism, and sending the military into others' lands, is a critical component of American republicanism, and a factor in independence itself.

The True Story of the Louisiana Purchase Is One of Plunder of Native American Lands

The U.S. didn't buy a huge tract of land from France. It bought the right to displace Native Americans from that land.

The Accidental Patriots

Many Americans could have gone either way during the Revolution.

Not Our Independence Day

The Founding Fathers were more interested in limiting democracy than securing and expanding it.
Lewis and Clark expedition, with Sacagawea whitened out in the center.

How The West Was Wrong: The Mystery Of Sacagawea

Sacagawea is a symbol for everything from Manifest Destiny to women’s rights to American diversity. Except we don't know much about her.
Black Democrats raise their hands at the Democratic Convention.

23 Maps That Explain How Democrats Went From the Party of Racism to the Party of Obama

The longest-running party in America has seen significant shifts in its ideological and geographic makeup.
Map of Western United States organized by watersheds

This 19th Century Map Could Have Transformed the West

According to John Wesley Powell, outside of the Pacific Northwest, the arid lands of the west could not be farmed without irrigation.
Poster for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
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Where the Buffalo Roam

How Buffalo Bill’s Wild West brought scenes from the American West to audiences around the globe.
Audubon painting of an eagle with a rabbit in its talons.

John James Audubon, the American "Hunter-Naturalist"

Audubon drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature, helping them see it in national and environmental terms.
Science fiction landscape.

75 Years Ago, "The Martian Chronicles" Legitimized Science Fiction

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.
John Quincy Adams
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Are You Not Large and Unwieldy Enough Already?

John Quincy Adams challenges the idea of an expanding American frontier. 
Cover of "America, América" by Greg Grandin.

The Dialectic Lurking Behind the Brutality

Greg Grandin’s new book tells the story of US expansionism and its complex relationship with the rest of the New World.
Engraving by Samuel de Champlain of himself and his Algonquin allies attacking the Iroquois.

An Expanding Vision of America

Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.
<p>Earth rising over the Moon, captured by Lunar Orbiter 1, 1966. Courtesy NASA/<a href="https://www.planetary.org/articles/1238" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Planetary Society</a></p>

How the Scientists of the 1960s Turned the Moon into a Place

For most of history, the Moon was regarded as a mysterious and powerful object. Then scientists made it into a destination.

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