Place

What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone?

Boston has more "made" land than any other American city.

After navigating a minor hiccup in our own provisioning process, we set out for the West on what would be our longest trip yet.

How decades-old decisions to build two California prisons in a dry lakebed and a chaotic climate left 8,000 incarcerated people at risk.

"It's the story of a family who had been denied justice about a piece of land they owned for at least 160 years."

From homesteaders to tourists to the U.S. Army, railroads flooded the Great Plains with people who saw bison as pests, amusements, or opportunities for profit.

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

The musical culture of the New York metropolitan area, combined with themes of suburban life, suffuse the legends' music.

Innovators are using digital tools to tell stories of the city’s Black and Latinx history.

The nineteenth-century establishment of mid-Atlantic coal mines and canals gave America its first taste of abundant fossil fuel energy.

More than 3,800 formerly enslaved people are buried in the military cemetery.

A new book links the rise of American prisons to the expansion of American power around the globe.

A small band of Modoc warriors held off hundreds of U.S. soldiers in California. Ultimately, the conflict left the Modoc leaders dead and the tribe divided.

Tracing the life of the author who seemed to be from both everywhere and nowhere.

An Indigenous sacred site, Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks has served as a military barracks, a fairground and, more recently, a golf course.

What does Hermann’s watchful position over New Ulm—stolen Dakota homelands— reveal about settler colonialism and the geography of memory?

The bicycle is a symbol of youth, but in the mid-twentieth century it also symbolized Black joy and mobility.

How San Francisco's Chinatown community used infrastructure as a conduit for identity, empowerment, and resilience.

The Arch in St. Louis stands as a monument to contradictory histories.

And it's all thanks to this mother-daughter dream team.

Unveiling the conflict and consequences in Kirkwood's expansion.

The expansion of higher education in Virginia uprooted hundreds of black families.

Tracing the currents of American history that run through the Great Lakes region.

Sixty-plus years ago, the white leaders of Newport News, Virginia, seized the core of a thriving Black community to build a college.

“It is true that my life has been threatened as the leader of this playground campaign,” wrote Mabel E. Macomber in 1929 from Brooklyn’s Bedford neighborhood.

Golden prairies of a Minnesota state park also hold the burial sites of Dakota people who died as the U.S. failed to fulfill treaties with Native Americans.

Louis Armstrong’s complicated relationship with New Orleans.

Seeking rural solitude, urban Southern Californians ventured into the Mojave Desert, armed with pickaxes and dreams but facing harsh landscapes and red tape.

Visiting the sites of two 19th-century utopian experiments in the American Midwest.

The “syringe tides”—waves of used hypodermic needles, washing up on land—terrified beachgoers of the late 1980s. Their disturbing lesson was ignored.