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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.
by Gregory H. Nobles via Commonplace on January 1, 2012
Mount Rushmore

On Myths and Monuments

Mount Rushmore and storytelling at America’s national parks.
by Stephen R. Hausmann via Perspectives on History on July 9, 2025
Lee Pattie Registrar's Report

Trouble with the Brothers: Booze, Divorce, and Madness in the American West

The past really is a foreign country, as historian Jonathan Ablard finds when piecing together the turbulent history of his ancestors in the West and Midwest.
by Jonathan Ablard via Tropics of Meta on June 23, 2025
Drawing of cowboys riding in the desert, guns drawn, while a herd grazes.

The Hell We Raised: How Texas Shaped the Gunfighter Era

Texans left an enduring mark on the gunfighter era. The frontier was a darker place because of it.
by Bryan Burrough via Texas Monthly on May 5, 2025
Science fiction landscape.

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

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.
by Sam Weller via Literary Hub on April 28, 2025
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. 
by Andrew C. Isenberg via HNN on April 23, 2025
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.
by Ieva Jusionyte via Los Angeles Review of Books on April 23, 2025
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.
by Nicole Eustace via New York Review of Books on March 6, 2025
<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.
by Danny Robb via Aeon on February 13, 2025
1908 forest fire in New Hampshire.
partner

The Burned-Over District

The Northeast caught fire this fall, in a way that recalls its past. History has some lessons about how to manage the region’s fire seasons to come.
by Stephen Pyne via HNN on December 10, 2024
Andrew Jackson meets a Creek military officer.

The Forgotten War that Made America

The overlooked Creek War set the tone for America to come.
by Sean Durns via The American Conservative on October 17, 2024
Essay entitled "America," full of editorial markings.

America Is Not America Yet

On American history and the history of the word “America.”
by Alexander Aviña via The Dial on October 3, 2024
A homesteader woman feeding chickens.

Some Country for Some Women

As women stretch themselves thin, homesteader influencers sell them an image of containment.
by Kim Hew-Low via The New Inquiry on September 26, 2024
Illustration imagining Karl Marx sitting on a ranch in Texas.

Marx Goes to Texas

Drawn to communities of German socialist expatriates in the area, Marx once considered making his way to Texas.
by Ryan Moore via Protean on August 11, 2024
Engraving of the Battle of Lexington After Alonzo Chappel: American colonists and British soldiers exchange fire at the Battle of Lexington, the first skirmish in the US War of Independence.

Taking Up the American Revolution’s Egalitarian Legacy

Despite its failures and limitations, the American Revolution unleashed popular aspirations to throw off tyranny of all kinds.
by Taylor Clark via Jacobin on July 4, 2024
An eye in the shape of the United States.

The Weaponization of Storytelling

The American public is more susceptible than ever to skewed narratives.
by Colin Dickey via The New Republic on June 27, 2024
John Muir.

What a Young John Muir Learned In the Wisconsin Wilderness

The Scottish-born naturalist’s early years in the United States.
by Amanda Bellows via Literary Hub on June 14, 2024
A rider from the 9th US Cavalry, one of several segregated units called the Buffalo Soldiers.

Meet The Black Cowboys Who Shaped Colorado History

The gunslingers, innovators, and explorers who carved their destinies from the sprawling promise of the West.
by Corey Buhay via Atlas Obscura on May 29, 2024
A house and people from the American frontier.

The Wild Blood Dynasty

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit.
by Adam Begley via The Atlantic on May 14, 2024
The Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
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Walt Disney Presents Manifest Destiny

On the St. Louis theme park that never made it past the drawing board.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via HNN on April 30, 2024
Willa Cather wearing a mink shawl and a large hat in Paris

Prairie Swooner

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.
by Eric Banks via Bookforum on February 6, 2024
The subjects of Grant Wood's American Gothic channel speaking styles popular in California and New York.

A Brief History of the United States' Accents and Dialects

Migration patterns, cultural ties, geographic regions and class differences all shape speaking patterns.
by Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton via Smithsonian on January 17, 2024
Map of the Mason-Dixon line.

Mason-Dixon Lines

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow will be no better.
by Edward G. Gray via Commonplace on January 16, 2024
A photograph of John G. Neihardt raising his fists to box.
partner

A Tale of Two Visionaries

What roiled the mind of Nebraska poet John Neihardt with whom Black Elk, the iconic Lakota holy man, shared his story?
by Gus Mitchell via JSTOR Daily on December 13, 2023
Farmers on a tractor harvesting grain.

Rural America Has Lost Its Soul

Jefferson's vision of the family farm is a myth that won't die.
by Steven Conn via UnHerd on November 27, 2023
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.
by Benjamin Taylor via Literary Hub on November 15, 2023
View from Nauvoo from across the Mississippi River
original

Community Ideal

Visiting the sites of two 19th-century utopian experiments in the American Midwest.
by Ed Ayers on August 29, 2023
Prehistoric mounds on the campus of Louisiana State University.

Googling for Oldest Structure in the Americas Leads to Heaps of Debate

The straightforward way in which Google answers this query is a case study in how new science becomes accepted as fact in the modern era of rapid communication.
by Jordan P. Hickey via Washington Post on August 28, 2023
Sign advertising land for sale, near sign marking entrance to Mojave National Preserve.

The American West’s Great Checkerboard Problem

As long as the U.S. system privileges private property, thousands of acres of public lands will remain off limits.
by Julia Sizek via Zócalo Public Square on August 8, 2023
Cormac McCarthy.

Cormac McCarthy’s Unforgiving Parables of American Empire

He demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering.
by Greg Grandin via The Nation on June 21, 2023
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