Drawing of a Black man in court pleading with a judge in 1741.

Was the Conspiracy That Gripped New York in 1741 Real?

Rumors that enslaved Black New Yorkers were planning a revolt spread across Manhattan even more quickly than the fires for which they were being blamed.
Black and white picture of two elephants standing next to two women in a field.

The Hidden History of Resort Elephants at Miami Beach

Two elephants living at a Miami Beach resort blurred the boundaries between work and leisure in 1920s Florida.
Syrian children, possibly in Little Syria, Manhattan.

Remembering New York’s Little Syria

The ethnic enclave in Lower Manhattan was home to refugees fleeing civil war and entrepreneurs taking advantage of a globalizing economy.
Old millhouse down a garden path.

Reclaiming a North Carolina Plantation

On a former plantation in Durham, a land conservancy and two determined sisters are pioneering a model for providing land to Black gardeners and farmers.
A topographical map from the 1850s showing Alexander's Island as an entity in the Potomac

A Cartographer’s Lament: The D.C. - Virginia Boundary That Wouldn't Stay Put

Was this Virginia? No one was quite sure.
Walter Barnes and His Royal Creolians, a popular jazz orchestra from Chicago.

Rhythm Night Club Fire: Tragedy Devastated Young Black Natchez

In April 1940, Walter Barnes and His Royal Creolians continued to play to calm the crowd as the Natchez Rhythm Night Club burned.
The women of the Source Family pose on a Rolls-Royce for an ad for the release of a recording of the cult's band, Ya Ho Wha 13.

The Cult Roots of Health Food in America

How the Source Family, a radical 1970s utopian commune, still impacts what we eat today.
Route of Horatio Jackson's and Sewall Crocker's coast-to-coast road trip in 1903.

The Coast-to-Coast Road Trip is 120 Years Old

In 1903, a doctor bet $50 that he could cross America by car. The first coast-to-coast road trip in history took 63 days and cost $8,000.
Rows of Klansmen in white hoods with faces exposed march on Washington; the dome of the Capitol is visible in the background.

When the Klan Ruled Indiana… And Had Plans to Spread Its Empire of Hate Across America

The Klan dens of the heartland were powerful, vicious, and ambitious. Indiana was their bastion.
Staten Island Ferry Terminal.

Staten Island, Forgotten Borough

Staten Island gets a lot of disrespect from other New Yorkers, some of it fair. But it has its own fascinating people’s history.
Senator McCarran greeted by a group of men in front of a plane.

What Nevada Stole from Its Indigenous People

Senator Pat McCarran’s vision for the desert carried a tradition of dispossession into the mid-20th century.
64 East 7th Street, New York City, 2022.

The Parsonage

An unprepossessing townhouse in the East Village has been central to a series of distinctive events in New York City history.
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.
original

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.
Photograph of The Flint River flowing at Sprewell Bluff Park in Upson County.

Jimmy Carter, Protector of Rivers

Jimmy Carter is known as a eradicator of disease and champion for world peace, but he also supported environmental efforts closer to home.
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.