Place

Photographs of Ellis Island and the people who arrived there seeking a better life.

Washington has long been a disproportionately gay city—a mecca for clever, ambitious young men who want to escape their hometowns’ prying eyes.

A stubborn and surprising immigrant enclave, hiding in plain sight on the Lower East Side.

The killing of three civil-rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964 changed America.

Forced to bear her enslaver's children, Mary Lumpkin later forged her own path to freedom.

Interactive map shows Milwaukee’s housing patterns reflect not only aesthetic trends but also how historical events like immigration, war and civil rights shaped the city.

In the 1960s, a man named Robert E. Simon Jr. dreamed of a city that would be open to all, regardless of race or income: Reston, VA.

For nearly all of its modern existence, the Great Dismal Swamp has been excluded from U.S. history. Now there’s a push to bring its significance to light.

Her narrative documents the very real dangers enslaved runaways experienced while traveling through so-called "free states" of the North.

The National Black Political Convention of 1972 saw many national giants on the Black political scene.

"Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin" is a vibrant cultural history that looks beyond pervasive narratives of cultural renaissance and urban neglect.

Why dam removal is critical for restoring the Charles River.

A history of imperial forgetting.

The 1872 act that established the nature preserve provoked Lakota assertions of sovereignty.

Let us let the ghosts of the megafauna rise, but let us leave the old imperialists to lie in their graves undisturbed.

A brief history of how the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) led organized protests against racially-discriminatory housing in Los Angeles.

Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape creations, especially his urban parks, remain a vital part of our present.

In the 1960s, Chicago’s white neighborhoods didn’t want Mexican Americans moving in. But one determined real estate broker changed everything.

World War I saw the advent of chemical weaponry, and a mysterious chapter in the history of American University in Northwest DC.

On the evening of 16 December 1835, a fire broke out near Wall Street. It swept away 674 buildings and though devastation seemed absolute, citizens quickly rebuilt.

Freedman's Village, created in Arlington, VA at the end of the Civil War, became a thriving community of Black residents as part of Reconstruction.

Unearthing the Black history in America’s national parks.

From Seneca Village to “urban renewal,” the government has claimed Black property—rarely with the “just compensation” promised by the Fifth Amendment.

Exclusion and violence in Western U.S. states help explain the Whiteness of winter sports.

Marie Bankhead Owen led campaigns to purge anti-Confederate lessons from Southern classrooms, and all but erased Black history from the Alabama state archives.

How the Windy City became a Latinx metropolis in the second half of the twentieth century.

The 1954 US nuclear tests absolutely devastated the small island nation, but the US has steadfastly refused to make real amends for it.

On the relationships formed and marriages made by the fur trade.

Japanese Americans enter the frame of everyday Midwestern lives.

As cholera swept through New York, people tried their best to survive.