Mark Twain

Having inherited his mother’s beliefs, Reagan was ever faithful to the Disciples of Christ, whose tenets were often at odds with those of the GOP.

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has. The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book.

Floyd’s unusual visibility gives rare insight into how the largely-invisible dragomen shaped travelers’ understandings of the Bible and the Holy Land.

There are better models for President Trump than William McKinley. 

A new theory of the leisure class influencer.

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.

Percival Everett refashions a Mark Twain classic.

A shocking image of the 1906 atrocity survived but failed to become a humanitarian touchstone.

It puts the people in the most peril in the center of the story: the people being systematically exploited, chained, whipped and raped.

Already prone to boiler explosions that regularly killed scores of passengers, steamboats were pushed to their limits in races that valued speed over safety.

Ken Burns’ account of prohibition tells a popular story of booze in America. The historical record is far more sobering.

A new history makes a case for the world-ordering power of wheat.

The iconic songwriter has transcended time and place for 60 years. What should that mean for the rest of us?

Digital archiving is shoddy and incomplete, and it will hamper the ability of future generations to understand the current era.

The Czech composer came to New York with the conviction that African-American melodies would be the ‘seedbed’ for their nation’s 20th-century music.

Julian Fellowes' new series dramatizes the late 19th-century clash between New York City's old and new monied elite.

'Did slavery make home always somewhere else?'

What turned Smedley Butler into a critic of American foreign policy?

The story of President Andrew Jackson's 1,400-pound block of cheese.

Despite its universalist claims, the field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion.