Place

"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.

Mary Lumpkin’s life helps us to better understand the post-Civil War push for education.

The 400-year-old site of Jamestown, Va., battered by flooding and climate change, is listed as endangered.

At one of Boston’s historical burial grounds, more than 1,000 Black Bostonians were laid to rest in unmarked graves. Their legacy continues to haunt us today.

Laws meant to safeguard great buildings and neighborhoods can also present an obstacle to social progress.

What kind of place was the town I grew up in?

Western landscapes and their names are stratified with personal memories, ancestral teachings, mythic events and colonial disturbances.

Joetha Collier, a young Black woman, was killed by a white man in 1971, near the Mississippi town where Emmett Till was murdered. Why isn’t her case well-known today?

A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people.

Three books offer views of the shift from public planning to neoliberal privatization, and emphasize the need to reclaim planning in the public interest.

How an industry responded to the needs of workers and of the federal government during a time of rapid mobilization for wartime production.

The American Midwest was once a site of radical experimentation for various communitarian groups. What has become of their legacy?

How an old textbook lodged itself in the heart of New Orleans’ self-mythology.