John Brown

A history tour at Harper’s Ferry suggests that “commemoration” and “desecration” might be two sides of the same coin.

Two recent books examine the idea of the Midwest as a haven for white supremacy and patriarchy.

The struggle for progress is always two steps forward and at least one step back.

The US Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property.

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.

What a video of an Jan. 6 insurrectionist illustrates about race, religion, and nationalism in the MAGA movement.

In his new book, "The Crooked Path to Abolition," James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

Nobody was listening, so she brought some rocks.

In our flattened historical imagination, pictures of atrocity and those of progress can coincide in unsettling ways.

A new creative history comes closer than ever to giving us access to Turner’s visionary life.

Thaddeus Stevens was a fierce opponent of the “odious” compromises in the Constitution, and of the North’s compromises after the Civil War.

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

An activist, writer, doctor and intellectual, James McCune Smith, born enslaved, directed his talents to the eradication of slavery.

The story of John Wolcott Phelps and his push for Lincoln to emancipate all slaves.

Over time, the historic roots of some holiday music have been forgotten.

Elements of the Puritans’ unique worldview were handed down for generations and were carried westward by their descendants, the people we call Yankees.

‘Struggle: From the History of the American People’ charts the strife of early US history in a fierce Cubist/Expressionist style.

Revisionist biographers have given us countless perspectives, from Honest Abe to Killer Lincoln. Is there a version that’s true to his time and attuned to ours?

Generations of readers have chosen to emphasize Thoreau's spiritual communion with Nature, but Walden begins with trenchant critique of “progress.”