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Portrait of Ambrose Bierce with skull

One of America's Best

Ambrose Bierce deviated from the refined eeriness of English-style ghost stories for his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation.
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Books That Speak of Books

How a subgenre of murder mysteries plays with the way real history is written.
Cover of "James" by Percival Everett

Gulp Fiction, or Into the Missouri-verse

On Percival Everett’s “James.”
Scene from "Schindler's List."

How 'Schindler's List' Transformed Americans' Understanding of the Holocaust

The 1993 film also inspired its director, Steven Spielberg, to establish a foundation that preserves survivors' stories.
The Varner-Hogg Plantation House, Brazoria County, Texas.

The Texas Historical Commission Removed Books on Slavery From Plantation Gift Shops

An agency spokesperson claimed that the move had nothing to do with politics. Internal emails show otherwise.
Book cover of "The Acrobat," featuring a jumbled facial picture of Cary Grant.

Acid’s First Convert, Cary Grant: On Edward J. Delaney’s “The Acrobat"

A novel illuminates a moment of psychedelic history that has often been overlooked: the emergence of LSD psychotherapy just before the moral panic took hold.
A still from the 1960 film Spartacus of two Roman gladiators fighting.

How Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus Broke the Hollywood Blacklists

The 1960 film was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its arrival in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt in Hollywood.
A window through which an otherwise black and white leaf can be seen with a rainbow.

Native American Histories Show Rebuilding is Possible — and Necessary — After Catastrophe

What the Medicine Wheel, an indigenous American model of time, shows about apocalypse.
Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe Had a Promising Military Career. Then He Blew it Up.

Netflix’s “The Pale Blue Eye” portrays Edgar Allan Poe as a young West Point cadet. Here’s the true story of his brief, failed military career.
Chuck Norris as Sergeant Cordell Walker in Walker: Texas Ranger.

Walkers and Lone Rangers: How Pop Culture Shaped the Texas Rangers Mythology

Texas’s elite police force has long played the hero in film and television, although the reality is far more complex.
Up close of Viola Davis in African warrior gear from on the set of the film "The Woman King."

The Woman King Softens the Truth of the Slave Trade

The Dahomey had fierce female fighters. They also sold people overseas.
In the preface to a new book version of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter and the leading force behind the endeavor, recalls that it began as a “simple pitch.”

The 1619 Project and the Demands of Public History

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.
A board game with different continents of the world and markers.

Playing with the Past: Teaching Slavery with Board Games

Board games invite discussions of counterfactuality and contingency, resisting the teleology and determinism that are so common to looking backward in time.
Bob Dylan singing

Bob Dylan, Historian

In the six decades of his career, Bob Dylan has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.
American Girl dolls

The Enduring Nostalgia of American Girl Dolls

The beloved line of fictional characters taught children about American history and encouraged them to realize their potential.

How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism

Sci-fi has long provided an outlet for socialist thinkers — offering readers a break from capitalist realism and allowing us to imagine a different world.

Watching “Watchmen” as a Descendant of the Tulsa Race Massacre

Who should be allowed to profit from depictions of traumatic events in Black history?
The cover of Exodus by Leon Uris.

How Americans Were Taught to Understand Israel

Leon Uris's bestselling book "Exodus" portrayed the founding of the state of Israel in terms many Americans could relate to.
Book cover of "Ride the Devil's Herd," featuring a mustachioed man wearing a hat

Wyatt Earp Does Not Rest in Peace

A pair of new books about US Marshal Wyatt Earp are now out. Only one of them shoots straight.

The Long Reinvention of the South Bronx

Peter L'Official on the Mythologies Behind Urban Renewal.

Hearts and Stomachs

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle has come to symbolize an era of muckraking and reform. But its author sought revolution, not regulation.

Emily Dickinson Escapes

A new biography and TV show present Emily Dickinson as a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.
Still from "Harriet" depicting Tubman holding a scared girl and pointing a shotgun.
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What ‘Harriet’ Gets Right About Tubman

In the 1850s, abolitionists, including black women, fought for freedom by force.

The Real Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius

The inventor did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.

The Secret Story of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Last Tango

For six years they eluded the most powerful detectives on the planet and outran their past across the wilds of South America.
Book cover of the novel Trinity, depicting a man in a business suit casting a long shadow.

On Oppenheimer

A conversation with Louisa Hall about her novel, “Trinity.”
Collage of paper clippings including headless a running man, an explosion where his head would be, and a jet flying alongside him.

Ante Up: The Scales of Power Seen Through Norman Podhoretz’s Eyes

In retrospect, it was peculiar but not surprising that the Jewish-American novel peaked early—halfway through the beginning, to be precise.

Black Wall Street: The African American Haven That Burned and Then Rose From the Ashes

The story of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district isn’t well known, but it has never been told in a manner worthy of its importance.

The Issue on the Table: Is 'Hamilton' Good for History?

In a new book, top historians discuss the musical’s educational value, historical accuracy and racial revisionism.
Anna Williams

A Slave Who Sued for Her Freedom

An enslaved woman who jumped from a building in 1815 is later revealed to be the plaintiff in a successful lawsuit for her freedom.

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