Place

The University of Virginia was supposed to transform a slave-owning generation, but it failed.

In six weeks, 12,000 were dead of influenza.

After an African-American cemetery was bulldozed, families wondered what happened to the graves.

What is Texas? Should we even think about so large and diverse a place as having an essence that can be distilled?

America’s racialized topography means African-American historical sites are especially vulnerable to climate change.

A battle over local control in a city that was the face of integration shows the extent of the new segregation problem in the U.S.

Many people think of the White House as a symbol of democracy, but it also embodies America’s complicated past.

Twenty years ago my hometown made national headlines when the local college staged an internationally acclaimed play about gay men and the AIDS crisis.

The North Carolina Klan thought burning crosses would scare the Lumbee tribe out of Robeson County. That’s not how things went down.

Hundreds of ancient Native American sites along the Gulf Coast are at risk.

Ninety years ago, young African Americans in the South took up the Lindy Hop. It was an act of resistance and an assertion of freedom.

Lizabeth Cohen on the poverty and prosperity of the American city.

A brief history of theater fires in New York City—and the regulations that helped people escape them.

In America’s bloody history of racial violence, the little-known Elaine Massacre may rank as the deadliest.

Charlottesville and the UVA were enthusiastic participants in the national resurgence of public and celebratory white supremacy.

The Mic-O-Say was founded in 1925, under the leadership of Harold Roe Bartle, a two-term Kansas City mayor known in his social circles as ‘Chief.’

"You can't disentangle blackness and California."

Why some journalists amassed reams of data and published thousands of pages to promote their home cities.

Today, it’s a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments.

America was built by the labor of stolen African bodies, on stolen Native American lands.

Rikers Island jails were supposed to be the more humane model when they were built. New York City has the same lofty goals as it plans Rikers’ replacements.

The Kingdom of the Happy Land represents just one of many Black placemaking efforts in Appalachia. We must not forget it.

Nearly one hundred years before enslaved African arrived in Jamestown, the Spanish brought 100 slaves to the coast of what is now Georgia or South Carolina.

A profile of UVA graduate R.T.W. Duke Jr., who presided over the 1924 dedication of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville.

A Louisiana tribe’s long fight against the American tide.

After the television cameras went away, a North Carolina city debated the future of its toppled Confederate statue.

From ancient Rome to modern Atlanta, the technologies that allow people to commute in about 30 minutes have defined the shape of cities.

The failed canal project that could have saved cities like Youngstown, Ohio.

A Jewish American reflects on a life spent amidst the ghosts of the American South and the former capital of the Reich.

Why was the Golden State once chock-full of memorials to the Southern rebels?