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Photo of California gold fragment found by John Sutter in 1848

A Pacific Gold Rush

On the roads and seas miners traveled to reach gold in the United States and Australia.
A firefighting tanker drops retardant over the Grandview Fire
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Drought-Related Crises Are Afflicting Millions. Desert Dwellers Can Offer Advice.

If we accept that we live in a desert nation, we can glean insights about how to live with aridity.
Abstract composition by Valentijn Edgar Van Uytvanck, 1918

Still Farther South: Poe and Pym’s Suggestive Symmetries

In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue. John Tresch guides us along this strange trip southward.
painting of a monkey smoking a pipe

Our Strange Addiction

The transformation of tobacco and cannabis into early modern global obsessions.
Lithograph of Chinese railroad workers waving to train as it comes through a mountain tunnel.

What Was It Like to Ride the Transcontinental Railroad?

The swift, often comfortable ride on the Transcontinental Railroad opened up the American West to new settlement.
Remnants of a mural of Viking boats.

Did Indigenous Americans and Vikings Trade in the Year 1000?

Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel?

Pulling Down Our Monuments

The Sierra Club's executive director takes a hard look at the white supremacy baked into the organization's formative years.

The Empire of All Maladies

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.
A drawing of a moose skeleton in front of a wilderness scene.

Flu in the Arctic: Influenza in Alaska, 1918

A graphic essay about the brutal toll taken by the epidemic on indigenous communities in Alaska.

COVID-19 Didn’t Break the Food System. Hunger Was Already Here.

Like everything else in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, American food has become almost unrecognizable overnight.

The Largest Human Zoo in World History

Visiting the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

How American Samoa Kept a Pandemic at Bay

A story of quarantine.

Trump's Border Wall Threatens an Arizona Oasis with a Long, Diverse History

Border wall construction is encroaching on a site where people from many cultures have interacted for thousands of years.
Military headstones for American Indians at the site of the Carlisle Indian School.

The U.S. Stole Generations of Indigenous Children to Open the West

Indian boarding schools held Native American youth hostage in exchange for land cessions.

Rising Seas Threaten Hundreds of Native American Heritage Sites Along Florida’s Gulf Coast

Hundreds of ancient Native American sites along the Gulf Coast are at risk.
Margaret Mead in front of a bookshelf, with a book in hand

How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity

A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?

Mapping Non-European Visions of the World

These maps drawn by Indigenous artists depict a union of visual traditions during the 16th century.
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The World According to the 1580s

A newly digitized map offers a rare glimpse at the way Europeans conceived of the Americas before British colonization.
A fanciful, seventeenth-century depiction of the fall of Tenochtitlan, with clashing armies.

Did Colonialism Cause Global Cooling? Revisiting an Old Controversy

However the Little Ice Age came to be, we now know that climatic cooling had profound consequences for contemporary societies.

The Vanishing Indians of “These Truths”

Jill Lepore's widely-praised history of the U.S. relies on the eventual exit of indigenous actors to make way for other dramas.
A painting entitled "The First Thanksgiving, 1621" by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (ca. 1932).

Thanksgiving: The National Day of Mourning

A Native student explains why the holiday is a painful reminder of a whitewashed past.
Human skull in a museum display case.

The Extremely Fast Peopling of the Americas

Two genetic studies show how the first Native Americans spread through their new continent with incredible speed.
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One of the 19th Century’s Most Important Documents Was Recently Discovered

How a rare copy of the U.S.-Navajo Treaty, once thought lost, was found in a New England attic.
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The Greatest American Historian You've Never Heard Of

An appreciation of Alfred Crosby, who coined the term "Columbian exchange."
Goosefoot plant.

Hunting for the Ancient Lost Farms of North America

2,000 years ago, people domesticated these plants. Now they’re wild weeds. What happened?

Forgiving the Unforgivable: Geronimo’s Descendants Seek to Salve Generational Trauma

Traveling to the heart of Mexico for a Ceremonia del Perdón.
An illustration of Christopher Columbus’s initial meeting with Native Americans.

The Columbian Exchange

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

The Racism Behind Alien Mummy Hoaxes

Pre-Columbian bodies are once again being used as evidence for extraterrestrial life.

Hitler's American Dream

The dictator modeled his racial campaign after another conquest of land and people-America's Manifest Destiny.

Native Land Digital

Do you live on Native American territory?

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