Tag: American History

The quest to save the American chestnut tree.

To understand what the Golden State is compared to what it was, one solitary hiker follows the trail of the first overland Spanish expedition into California 250 years later.

In their time, “Jaws” and “Nashville” were regarded as Watergate films, and both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act.

In “The Heartland,” Kristin L. Hoganson says America’s Midwest has been more connected to global events than popular history allows — especially popular history as told in the Midwest.

On two tours of the South, taken 20 years apart, Pete Candler uncovers truths about his family and the place he comes from.

Daniel Immerwahr says studying the history of the Greater United States opens our eyes to how “racism has shaped the actual country itself. The legal borders of the country, but also the borders of the heart.”

Telling Washington’s story without erasing the people and lands that preoccupied him leads to important new questions; like, just how consequential for American history was the first president’s addiction to land speculation?

Secrecy and speechifying, collegiality and hierarchy, exceptionalism and opulence on the Supreme Court.

The unsolved mystery of a 1938 kidnapping continues to befuddle in Pennsylvania.

How should we think about the Fourth of July given the current circumstances?

By advocating for agriculture in the arid West, Major John Wesley Powell challenged the way America viewed its right to develop the continent.

The hope and future of the United States is bound to Alabama’s.

On the complex history and triumphant ubiquity of America’s most comforting staple.

America’s first black millionaires were born into slavery — and built wealth alongside political power.

On January 3, 1961, a nuclear reactor the size of a small grain silo exploded in the Idaho desert, causing one of the only recorded nuclear fatalities on U.S. soil.

Civil War monuments in the North erased an emancipated Black population. But the Sphinx looked to a new world: an integrated Africa and America.

The scene was restored, but thanks to Richard Nixon, a song about conservatism was cut from the 1972 movie “1776.”

Nine stories that explain the fraught history of the holiday, and the need for celebration. 

Is he confused, insane, or just paranoid? Evan Osnos traces the history of presidential incapacity for the New Yorker

The first report from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966 was a passionate defense of the government’s role in the arts.

“The lesson is simple: populism rises above all other concerns in Alabama.

Historian Merry Ellen Scofield, writing in Common-Place, dives deep into the intricacies of 19th century social etiquette: calling cards, the hierarchies and politics of who visits who and when, and the details of the cards themselves.

The curious quest to trace the history of a sex toy found in a 19th-century Quaker family home.

Elaine Brown was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Black Panther Party. She looks back on Jean Seberg, COINTELPRO, and internal divisions within the organization.

He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans, Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his plantation. He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager. His disposition is exceedingly proper […]