Peter S. Onuf

Four new books show how different, and maybe also why.

New exhibits put slavery at the center of Monticello's story, and make it clear that Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children.

The History Guys look at who has had access to guns in the U.S., and what those guns have meant to the people who have owned them.

The resurgence of the debate over the Sage of Monticello's legacy: Is Jefferson the ultimate patriot or ultimate hypocrite?

On the Oneida Community, a radical religious organization practicing “Bible communism,” and eventually, manufacturing silverware.

Looking for an easy buck, con artists in the early 1900s infamously "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge to immigrants fresh off the boat.

The story of America's oldest counterfeiters and why the Civil War spurred the Secret Service into hunting them down.

The story of the thousands of free-range pigs who managed New York’s waste in the 1800s.

Historian Isaac Campos traces the origins of the idea that marijuana causes violent madness…and finds the trail leads south, to Mexico.

How nativism and racism shaped the national movement towards Prohibition.

A perusal of Benjamin Franklin’s "Drinker’s Dictionary," and a chat about how the drink of choice in revolutionary America switched from cider to rum.

American Indians and the tumult in their cultures precipitated by the arrival of alcohol.

The legacy of Operation Pedro Pan, a plan to save Cuban children from communist indoctrination by leaving their families and resettling in the United States.

A brief discussion of the fierce 19th century debates over beards, and how booming American cities created the perfect climate for all that facial hair to grow.

A discussion of the patriotic attempt to spurn European fashion and spin cloth at home in the time leading up to the Revolutionary War.

When the federal government began to claim a stake in the public’s physical fitness, and the origins of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.

Nasology was a 19th century pseudoscience which claimed to explain personality traits based on the shape of a person’s nose.

How the mythologizing of the Union Army’s Irish Brigade helped dispel anti-Irish sentiment.

Syracuse University Geography professor Matt Huber discusses the 1930s oil boom in the American southwest, and the military might brought in to control it.

Using oral histories of early East Texas oil workers, recorded in the 1950s, we hear about the chaos and excess that accompanied the discovery of oil.