swimming

How a tragedy in New York City convinced Americans to learn how to swim.

On our millennia-long love-hate relationship with getting in the water.

How Wilbert Longfellow turned America into a nation of swimmers.

“If the public pool isn’t available and open, you don’t swim.”

Although most enslaved people worked in the fields, captive workers with strong swimming and diving skills were also exploited by plantation owners.

Today, drowning rates are disproportionately high among Black children. What’s being done?

Beyond public accommodations and schools, resistance to integration included keeping pools and amusement parks segregated.

In 1961, two African-American men decided to go swimming at a whites-only Nashville pool. In response, the city closed all its public pools — for three years.

As summers get hotter, public pools help people stay cool. Why are they so neglected?

For the first time, men are permitted to compete in artistic swimming at the 2024 Olympics. But none will.

A century of battles over a neighborhood pool reveal a complicated picture, about who matters, and who gets the chance to live well in a segregated city.

The blockbuster "Jaws" (1975) provoked fear by portraying sharks as "mindless eating machines." But what did people think of sharks before then?

The swimsuit that's controversial now for its sexist overtones was once controversial for its suggestions of women’s liberation.

Even as a child, Eugene Williams was not safe from the harm caused by the ways of northern racism.

In the 1920s, Washingtonians dealt with the summer heat by going to the nearest beach...at the Tidal Basin.

How did the sensuality, sexuality, and homosociality of exercise create intimate possibilities for Black women in postwar America?

Tracing the family history of some of today's most popular celebrities.

During the Jim Crow era, working-class Washingtonians' recreation options were far more limited—and dangerous.

On July 1, 1916, a young stockbroker from Philadelphia headed into the surf at Beach Haven, N.J.

In her thirty-two years as the keeper of Lime Rock Lighthouse, Ida Lewis challenged gender roles and became a national hero.

How a black teen’s drifting raft triggered a deadly week of riots 100 years ago in Chicago.

A century after the tragedies that shaped the nation's race relations.

The "bikini body" is out. But the pressure to maintain the ideal female physique lives on.

Have historians privileged land-based models and ignored how African Americans participated in aquatic activities?

“Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing…” — James Joyce, Ulysses