New perspectives on how history is made
How did women in 19th-century Europe learn about the birds and the bees?
The origins of the Electoral College are entwined with slavery, but not in the way that recent accounts have suggested.
In which John B. Calhoun begins to study the lifestyles of rodents, and the public listens.
On Joan of Arc’s much-maligned and forgotten haircut.
As the nation’s highest court debated Native sovereignty, I was in the archives, uncovering family stories entwined with those debates.
On Irving Howe and the New Left.
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.
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