New perspectives on how history is made
Many founders expressed their hope that slavery would be abolished, while simultaneously exerting themselves to defend it.
How a subgenre of murder mysteries plays with the way real history is written.
On civilians’ opinion of killing civilians by air during World War II.
Depictions of Antietam couldn’t possible capture the magnitude of the battle’s horror.
Revisiting the Agrarian-Distributists and their fabrication of an American past.
Why were so many early European books laden with self-deprecation? Blame genre conventions.
When the British government opened its archives to historians — and started relying less on the past for its own business.
Why have American abolitionists often been written out of the history of human rights?
On the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago.
An interview with the author of Cahokia Jazz.
The life of John Andrew Jackson — and the vacillating richness and scarcity of the archive.
The legacy of a radical summer camp in New Jersey tells a largely overlooked story about left-wing politics and Black culture.
In the 1920s, many in the U.S. fought for a living Constitution. Plenty of others wanted it dead.
How Europe reacted when Ethiopia tried to join the famed global sporting tradition at the 1924 Paris Olympics.
How a tragedy in New York City convinced Americans to learn how to swim.
For every moment of historical significance, there is a figure — often hidden — who fed the figures we do remember.
Finding a story in the ways Robert Ray Hamilton, John Dudley Sargent, and Edith Sargent weren’t quite forgotten.
On Nathanael Greene’s inauspicious start.
What happened to privacy when Americans gained easy access to cameras in the Gilded Age?
Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland provide an outlet for antiwar soldiers.
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