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Cover of "First Martyr of Liberty," featuring a painting of Crispus Attucks facing a British soldier with a bayonet.

Crispus Attucks, American Revolutionary Hero

With so little documentary evidence about his life, he is a virtual blank slate upon which different people at different times have inscribed a variety of meanings.

My Dad Painted the Cover for Jethro Tull's 'Aqualung,' and It's Haunted Him Ever Since

His quest to receive proper compensation illuminates the struggle for artists’ rights.

A Vacuum at the Center

How a demagogue resembles a typhoon, and why it matters to the future of the republic.
Charley Pride on stage.

Charley Pride’s Music Taught Listeners That Country Music Was Black Music, Too

The mythology of cowboy culture is aggressively white, but there was always a black West.

Restoring King

There is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr.

Teen Idol Frankie Lymon's Tragic Rise and Fall Tells the Truth About 1950s America

The mirage of the singer's soaring success echoes the mirage of post-war tranquility at home.

50 Years Ago, Protesters Took on Miss America and Electrified the Feminist Movement

Miss America pageant has a long history of controversy—including the 1968 protests.
Man giving a speech for the Taxpayers League of Minnesota.

Half a Century of Anti-tax Orthodoxy Is Wrong

Taxation is at the heart of any serious economic growth policy.

The Cuban Missile Crisis at 55

The bullshit, the truth… and Trump.

The Alamo: The First and Last Confederate Monument?

The Alamo supposedly honors the courage of Anglos pitted against Mexican brutality. In fact, it is about slavery and emancipation.
A Continental soldier in the Revolutionary War holding a tattered American flag and standing on chains.

We Could Have Been Canada

Was the American Revolution such a good idea?
Guitar Shorty sitting on a bench outside of a house, and playing guitar while smoking a cigar.

Put on my Clothes and Look Like Somebody Else

The life of Guitar Shorty was a mixture of facts, lies and fantasy. He was a blues musician who lived far outside mainstream society.

A Devastating Mississippi River Flood That Uprooted America's Faith in Progress

The 1927 disaster exposed a country divided by stereotypes, united by modernity.
National Park Service ranger presented with Senate resolution for new monument.

Monumental Effort: Historians and the Creation of the National Monument to Reconstruction

Two historians weigh in on President Obama's move to designate a national monument to Reconstruction in South Carolina.
Cartoon drawing of Francis Pharcellus Church.

The Journalist Who Understood The True Meaning Of Christmas

“Yes, Virginia” is the most reprinted newspaper piece in American history, and this guy wrote it.
The Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching reenactment.

A Lynching in Georgia: The Living Memorial to America’s History of Racist Violence

Activists in Georgia have been re-enacting the infamous 1946 murders of two black men and their wives.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, center, and the cast of "Hamilton" at the Richard Rodgers Theater.

Father Worship

Hamilton is less a new vision of the past than a translation of the sacred stories of American civil religion into the vernacular.

Ronald Reagan Was Once Donald Trump

The Trump candidacy looks a lot more like Reagan's than anyone might care to notice.
Cover of "Why Busing Failed," depicting anti-busing protestors surrounding a school bus.

Why Busing Failed

Getting the history of “busing” right enables us to see more clearly how school segregation and educational inequality continued in the decades after Brown.
Shades of green.
partner

Green Sprigs of Courage

How the mythologizing of the Union Army’s Irish Brigade helped dispel anti-Irish sentiment.
Go on Monopoly board

The Twisted History of Your Favorite Board Game

An interview with Mary Pilon about her new book, ‘The Monopolists,’ which uncovers the real story about how Monopoly became the game it is today.
Illustration of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur writing.

The American Beginning

The dark side of Crèvecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer."

Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates: The Problem With Popularization

Making history more appealing to the public may come at a cost.
Alexander Hamilton.

Inventing Alexander Hamilton

The troubling embrace of the founder of American finance.
Thanksgiving card featuring a turkey with a carving knife and fork in its back.

Talking Turkey

A conversation with food historian Andrew F. Smith on his new book, "The Turkey: An American Story."

No Laughing Matter

The evolution of the iconic smiley face and some of its not so happy connotations.
Caricature of Christopher Columbus

The Lost Mariner

The self-confidence that kept Columbus going was his undoing.
“The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,” an 1885 parody of an 1850 painting by Charles Lucy.

Thankstaking

Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?
Sign reading "take it down" in front of Confederate flag

Rebel Yell

The recent march in South Carolina, demanding removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol is the latest episode in a long-running debate over slavery's legacy.
Nuclear weapon mushroom cloud

Mythologizing the Bomb

The beauty of the atomic scientists' calculations hid from them the truly Faustian contract they scratched their names to.

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