Place

Many don’t realize Newport, Rhode Island launched more slave trading voyages than anywhere else in North America.

How is the first half of the 19th century depicted in and around the nation’s capital? Ed Ayers hits the road to find out.

Bodegas serve as lifelines and community centers, yet have faced heinous violence. Here is the story of the New York City bodega.

The tendency to favor interest in resource extraction over the protection of the state’s waters, vital to the native Ojibwe population, has deep historical roots.

The city is at a crossroads. Which path will it take?

Exploring the homes of two presidents, the birthplace of another, and a natural wonder that once drew visitors from far and wide.

In the 1940s about 20,000 men trained on racially segregated Montford Point in North Carolina.

Recruits learned the arts of infiltration, sabotage, and survival at a hidden base on Santa Catalina Island.

The long and brutal journey of the yam.

A new book challenges the dominant narrative that malls are dying.

“I’m going to find out what the hell the FBI did and I’m going to expose it to the world.”

These communities rely almost entirely on tourism for their existence—yet too much tourism, not to mention climate change, can destroy them.

"The tallest trees at Roaring Run remember sending down taproots even as the furnace stones were still warm. Desecration is not ironclad."

How Sioux Falls became a controversial Gilded Age “Mecca for the mismated.”

Ed Ayers travels back to his childhood stomping grounds in search of traces of the dispossession that took place there generations earlier.

The Rapid City flood helped define pervasive environmental injustice and catalyze action.

Utica became a refugee magnet by accident.

A new history of Detroit’s struggles for clean air and water argues that municipal debt and austerity have furthered an ongoing environmental catastrophe.

Ed Ayers heads south in search of stories from two centuries ago. Traces are there, but larger meanings remain elusive.

“It is a better likeness of Lincoln than anything in plaster, stone, marble, or bronze that I have ever seen."

The annual celebration helped spur an anti-colonial movement for Africa.

Pachappa Camp, the first Korean-organized immigrant settlement in the United States, was established through the efforts of Ahn Chang Ho.

Soul City was a boondoggle—not a story of lost or forgotten roads tragically not taken.

A whistleblower says new construction on an old plantation would disrupt important historic sites, including possibly unmarked graves of enslaved people.

After decades of reading, writing, and teaching about the American past, Ed Ayers sets out to see how that past is remembered in the places where it happened.

This northern city was shaped by racial terrorism and persistent advocacy for Black liberation.

A journal of my road trip to the formative decades of American history.

Generations of utopians seeking inspiration and sea breezes made the trek from Greenwich Village to Cape Cod’s picturesque vistas.

A new book about Rikers Island is essentially a labor history, revealing how jail guards seized control from managers, politicians, and judges.

Gene Tong, a popular herbal-medicine doctor in Los Angeles, was hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in American history.