Donellia Chives, a trustee of Penn Center.

White Gold from Black Hands: The Gullah Geechee Fight for a Legacy after Slavery

Descendants of the west Africans who picked the cotton that made Manchester rich are struggling to keep their distinct culture alive.
A sign that reads "U.S. Department of Energy, Nevada Test Site, Yucca Mountain Project."

The Fallout

The fight over nuclear waste on Yucca Mountain.
People outside the entrance to Luna Park on Coney Island, New York, 1890.

Luna Park and the Amusement Park Boom

The fortunes of Coney Island have waxed and waned, but in the early twentieth century, its amusement parks became a major American export.
South Front Street House, Philadelphia, PA (credit LOC).

Black Homeownership Before World War II

From the 1920s-1940s, North, West, and South Philadelphia saw its Black population increase by 50-80% as white flight occurred.
Photograph of glass factory, on glass, with man blowing glass behind it.

Unbreakable: Glass in the Rust Belt

Domestic glass manufacturing in the U.S. remains concentrated in the Rust Belt. But studio glassblowing is adding relevance to a long forgotten material.
Enslaved men gathered in the woods to plot a revolt.

Slavery and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century New Jersey

While documented revolts of enslaved persons in New Jersey aren’t abundant, some examples speak to the spirit of resistance among African people held captive.
Venable Mound, Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, built ca. 700–1200 CE.

Monuments Upon the Tumultuous Earth

For thousands of years, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids along the Mississippi River.
John Manuel Gandy, the namesake of a Hanover elementary school.

In Hanover, A Name is More than a Name

The sudden push to rename a historic school that educated scores of Black students reeks of revenge.
Collage of Hungerford School in Eatonville.

A Florida Town, Once Settled By Former Slaves, Now Fights Over "Sacred Land"

In Eatonville, one of the few Black towns to have survived incorporation, locals are fighting to preserve 100 acres of land from being sold to developers.
Visualization showing the largest cities in the US, from the Statistical Atlas of the Eleventh Census, 1790-1890

Growing New England's Cities

What can a visualization of population growth in cities and towns in the Northeast tell us about different moments in the region's economic geography?
An elephant holding a broom with its trunk.

Lions and Tigers and Cameras!

How the movies gave Los Angeles a zoo.
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Pieces of the Past

Dispatches from a spine-tingling day of visits to the places where James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Thomas Cole created their most famous works.
Malcolm Harris, left, and the cover of his book "Palo Alto," right. (Photo by Julia Burke)

The Obscene Invention of California Capitalism

A new history examines Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, the West Coast's settler ideology, and recent turbulence in the world of tech.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 3 in Fort Washington, Md.
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The Surprising Roots of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Idea of National Divorce

Greene probably has visions of suburban Atlanta in the 1990s and 2000s, not the Civil War.
Abandoned Brownwood subdivision, now the Baytown Nature Center, near Houston, Texas.

What Survives

Lacy M. Johnson walks through a nature center near Houston that has reclaimed the land where a neighborhood, sunken by oil extraction and floodwater, once stood.
U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington, DC, (ca. 1880-90).

Astronomy On The Flats

How the moons of Mars and the death of a president altered the late nineteenth-century Washington, DC, landscape.
Rats in a garden.

New York’s Rats Have Already Won

I thought having a rat czar would be an easy win for the city. I was wrong.
The Lady of the Rockies statue. Photo by Doug Zwick/Flickr.

The 90-foot Sentinel of Butte, Montana

What does a statue dedicated to mothers reveal about women’s rights?
Boxing ring set up in Dodger Stadium.

Whoever Killed Davey Moore Also Killed Boxing At Dodger Stadium

Why the first prizefight at Dodger's Stadium would become its last (outside of fiction).
1961 pamphlet for Florida's "Americanism vs. Communism" course.

The Long History of Conservative Indoctrination in Florida Schools

The top educational priorities in the Sunshine State were apparently reading, writing, and anti-communism.
Scientists carrying a log by using straps around their heads.

1,000 Years Ago, Ancient Puebloans Built a Mysteriously Vast City. We May Finally Know How.

High up on the Colorado Plateau, in what is today the state of New Mexico, sit the remains of what was once a city of epic proportions.
The angel Moroni delivering the plates of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith.
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Sacred Places

A visit to the site of Joseph Smith’s divine revelation makes for a different kind of public history experience.
Map of Iowa and a drawing of a factory processing corn.

Searching for the Spirit of the Midwest

Was the nineteenth-century Midwest “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen”?
John H. Smith (left), mayor of Prichard, Alabama, unsuccessfully campaigned for the creation of an Africatown national park.

The Forgotten 1980s Battle to Preserve Africatown

A new book tells the definitive history of an Alabama community founded by survivors of the slave trade.
The back of the Hollywood sign at sunset.

The Hollywood Sign Debuted 100 Years Ago in 1923, the Year of L.A.’s 'Big Bang'

The year 2023 marks the centennial of many iconic L.A. landmarks, including the Hollywood sign, Memorial Coliseum, Biltmore Hotel and the Angelus Temple.
A boat makes a morning trip through the Erie Canal in Rochester, New York, October 2021.

A Brief History of the Erie Canal

The waterway opened up the heartland to trade, transforming small hamlets into industrial centers.
A man eating an oyster.

Oyster Pirates in the San Francisco Bay

Once a key element in Native economies of the region, clams and oysters became a reliable source of free protein for working-class and poor urban dwellers.
From left to right, Langston Hughes with Charles S. Johnson; E. Franklin Frazier; Rudolph Fisher and Hubert T. Delaney.

Why Harlem? Considering the Site of “Civil Rights by Copyright,” 100 Years Later

The confluence of Black modernity, self-determinism, and belongingness of Harlem's housing.
World War I era African American soldier.

Black Virginians and the American Revolution

Enslaved conspirators in far-flung Accomack County forced some whites to rethink any legislative efforts aiding Black Virginians.
The image of the forlorn girl on the outskirts of the Highway to Nowhere was shot by John Van Horn in the fall of 1968

Road to Ruin

In the late 1960s, Baltimore began demolishing Black neighborhoods to make room for an ill-fated expressway. Will the harm from the Highway to Nowhere ever be repaired?