Place

A conversation with Erika Marie Bsumek about one of the worst boondoggles in the Southwest.

In the 1970s and early ’80s, NYC’s racially and ethnically diverse working-class neighborhoods nurtured groundbreaking rap, salsa, and punk music.

My ancestors were the good whites, or at least that’s what I’ve always wanted to believe.

Steps from Georgetown, a memorial to Teddy Roosevelt stands amid ghosts of previous inhabitants: the Nacotchtank, colonist enslavers, and the emancipated.

Before Theodore Roosevelt Island was transformed, a prominent Virginia family relied on enslaved laborers to build and tend to its summer home.

How a mid-century architecture competition reimagined the American home.

One man's role in shaping the nation's best-loved long-distance footpath reminds us of the close bonds that Jews have formed with the North American landscape.

There’s no one place to learn about the early decades of the 19th century. So I set off to see how that history is being remembered in the places where it happened.

Rewriting the history and future of an iconic suburb.

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow will be no better.

Farmworker housing cooperatives in Ventura County, California.

In the 1950s the construction of a dam on the Texas–Mexico border displaced communities from their land—and anticipated the wall-building underway today.

A racist mob forced Opal Lee and her family from their Fort Worth home. Now she has been given the land and a new house is being built for her.

What happened to the Bailey family in the Detroit suburb of Warren became a flashpoint in the national battle over integration.

The 26th president once demanded that military personnel be able to walk 50 miles in 20 hours. I set off on an ill-fated mission to see if I could do it myself.

A sweeping new history examines many untold stories of the American West in the late nineteenth century.

The fight for a dignified space to carry out the most basic of human functions was popular when 19th-century Progressives took it on. It's time to take up that fight again.

For generations, depictions of Native Americans have reduced them to either aggressors or victims. But at many public history sites, that is starting to change.

A search for the memory of R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia.

How can one place represent the complexity of the Civil War’s beginnings?

Greenbelt was designed in 1935 as a community created, built, populated and even furnished entirely by the federal government. Now the FBI is set to move in.

Hurricane Katrina exposed deep inequities in federal disaster response. "We never felt so cut off in all our lives."

Originally built as barriers between fields and farms, the region’s abandoned farmstead walls have since become the binding threads of its cultural fabric.

What we remember when we remember the Alamo.

The history of garbage dumps is the history of America.

My dad grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City. His story is a testament to how urban planning shapes countless lives.

Almost by accident, we find ourselves at the epicenter of the Colorado Gold Rush, which attracted prospectors to the Rockies a decade after the famous bonanza of ‘49.

In a technological age, impassioned devotees renew an ancient maritime tradition.

Is the cost worth the payoff?

Tensions between Salem and Danvers were there from the start—contributing to the ensuing witch hysteria.