Christy Mathewson, a pitcher for the New York Giants from 1900-1916.

When New York Made Baseball and Baseball Made New York

The rise of the sport as we know it was centered in Gotham, where big stadiums, heroic characters, and epic sportswriting produced a pastime that bound a city together.
The Castello Plan map, depicting the broad way (Broadway) and the Wall (Wall Street)

This New York City Map Is Full of Dutch Secrets

When Broadway was a broad way and Wall Street was a wall.
An assortment of Girl Scout cookies.

The Truth Behind the Girl Scout Cookie Graveyard

Even popular cookies can end up permanently cut from the roster.
A 1797 map of New York City.

The Black Cockade and the Tricolor

Space and place in New York City's responses to the French Revolution.
People walking around buildings destroyed by the Johnstown Flood.
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A Flood of Tourism in Johnstown

Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.
A black man peeking out from behind a door with bullet holes by a broadside schedule of Black Panther Party events.

Landmarking The Black Panther Party

In Chicago, preservationists have launched an unusual effort to explore the radical history of the 1960s civil rights group through the city’s built environment.
The Fulton Fish Market.

When Your Childhood Belongs to Everyone: Growing Up in a Manhattan That Changed Forever on 9/11

Loft life above the Fulton Fish Market and the day that everything changed.
San Diego U.S. Customs office.

San Diego’s South Bay Annexation Of 1957

Water insecurity, territorial expansion, and the making of a US-Mexico border city.
Archival map of the U.S.-Mexico border region near Mexicali, Mexico. Displays the Colorado River Delta system

A Cartography of Loss in the Borderlands

Mexicali’s "Colorado River Family Album" documents what is no more.
Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, New York.

The Last Of The Brooklyn Dodgers

Richard Staff interviews four former Brooklyn Dodgers players, who, despite the team's move to Los Angeles, still identify with their Brooklyn roots.
San Diego Postcard.

San Diego—A Green(Er) City: Six Decades Of Environmental Activism In A Biodiversity Hotspot

San Diego's city-wide mission to promote sustainability, combat climate change, and reduce environmental health disparities.
The Glen Canyon Dam.

Dubious Dam

A conversation with Erika Marie Bsumek about one of the worst boondoggles in the Southwest.
Black and white photo of the outside of a bar, with "CB GB: OMFUG" written on an overhang, and graffiti and posters on the walls and windows

Real Estate Developers Killed NYC’s Vibrant ’70s Music Scene

In the 1970s and early ’80s, NYC’s racially and ethnically diverse working-class neighborhoods nurtured groundbreaking rap, salsa, and punk music.
A photograph of the Arizona desert at sunset with cacti in the foreground.

I Want Settlers To Be Dislodged From the Comfort of Guilt

My ancestors were the good whites, or at least that’s what I’ve always wanted to believe.
People on Mason's Island
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Island in the Potomac

Steps from Georgetown, a memorial to Teddy Roosevelt stands amid ghosts of previous inhabitants: the Nacotchtank, colonist enslavers, and the emancipated.
Black and white photograph of an abandoned house with bare trees surrounding it

This Peaceful Nature Sanctuary in Washington, D.C. Sits on the Ruins of a Plantation

Before Theodore Roosevelt Island was transformed, a prominent Virginia family relied on enslaved laborers to build and tend to its summer home.
Painting of a square, white, house surrounded by trees, shrubbery, and a sidewalk.

Chicago Dream Houses

How a mid-century architecture competition reimagined the American home.
Two men hiking.

Jews in the Wilderness

One man's role in shaping the nation's best-loved long-distance footpath reminds us of the close bonds that Jews have formed with the North American landscape.
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The Era Without a Name

There’s no one place to learn about the early decades of the 19th century. So I set off to see how that history is being remembered in the places where it happened.
A sign for the Lakewood Drive-In Theater.

Living Black in Lakewood

Rewriting the history and future of an iconic suburb.
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.
A small farmworker house in Ventura with children playing outside.

Reimagining Resistance, Reconstructing Community

Farmworker housing cooperatives in Ventura County, California.
The Falcon Dam on the Rio Grande, which runs across the US–Mexico border, Starr County, Texas, 2017.

Stopping the Old Rio Grande

In the 1950s the construction of a dam on the Texas–Mexico border displaced communities from their land—and anticipated the wall-building underway today.
Opal Lee.

A Racist Mob Destroyed Her Home. She Was Given the Land 84 Years Later.

A racist mob forced Opal Lee and her family from their Fort Worth home. Now she has been given the land and a new house is being built for her.
Collage of George Romney giving a speech, the Baileys, their house, and riot police.

In 1967, a Black Man and a White Woman Bought a Home. American Politics Would Never Be the Same.

What happened to the Bailey family in the Detroit suburb of Warren became a flashpoint in the national battle over integration.

Why Did I Hike 50 Miles Through the Jersey Suburbs? Teddy Roosevelt Told Me To

The 26th president once demanded that military personnel be able to walk 50 miles in 20 hours. I set off on an ill-fated mission to see if I could do it myself.
This isn’t a controversial issue: New Yorkers want more public bathrooms.

Give Us Public Toilets

The fight for a dignified space to carry out the most basic of human functions was popular when 19th-century Progressives took it on. It's time to take up that fight again.
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Beyond Dispossession

For generations, depictions of Native Americans have reduced them to either aggressors or victims. But at many public history sites, that is starting to change.
A series of headshots of the members of R.E.M..

Was It Cooler Back Then?

A search for the memory of R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia.
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Where Kansas Bled

How can one place represent the complexity of the Civil War’s beginnings?