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Oneida Community members outside their mansion house, ca. 1865-1875.
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When We Say “Share Everything,” We Mean Everything

On the Oneida Community, a radical religious organization practicing “Bible communism,” and eventually, manufacturing silverware.
Cover of "Ghostland: An American History," made to look like a cemetery headstone.

The Family That Would Not Live

Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America's haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.
Woman being struck by lightning at Salem Witch Trials
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American Spirit: A History of the Supernatural

On the occasion of Halloween, an exploration of previous generations' fascination with ghosts, spirits, and witches.
People standing in circles holding hands, near a teepee.

Will New Age Ideas Help us in The High-Tech Future?

From Stonehenge to Silicon Valley: how technology nurtured New Age ideas in a world supposedly stripped of its magic.
Pearl Curran

Ghostwriter and Ghost: The Strange Case of Pearl Curran & Patience Worth

In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England Puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board.
Cover of "Suffrage Song" on left, featuring three suffragists. On right, cartoonist Caitlin Cass.

This Cartoonist Wants to Tell the Complicated History of Women’s Voting Rights

A new graphic book unpacks the role that some White women played in suppressing voting rights for all — and the lessons today in the fight for universal ballot access.
A copy of "On Death and Dying" with a magnifying glass in front of it.

Lost in the Five Stages of Grief

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying” sparked a revolution in end-of-life care. But soon she began to deny mortality altogether.
Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln’s Faith

The President's spiritual journey transformed him and the nation.
Ghostly woman.

Why Are There So Many Female Ghosts?

Female ghosts seem to dominate the afterlife. Whether the spirits are real or not, the reasons for the disparity could be revealing.

The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century

Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.
Abraham Lincoln in a photo circa 1847.

Abraham Lincoln’s Love Letters Captivated America. They Were a Hoax.

The Atlantic Monthly reported on newly found love letters between Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, his supposed sweetheart. Even biographers fell for the hoax.
Colorful lithograph showing the "Department of Electricity," a building with electrical lights positioned along the water, with a crowd of people entering

Colonizing the Cosmos: Astor’s Electrical Future

John Jacob Astor’s "A Journey in Other Worlds" is a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future.
Photo of an elderly Jane Stanford, dressed in lace and beads.

The Robber Baroness of Northern California

Authorities who investigated Jane Stanford’s mysterious death said the wealthy widow had no enemies. A new book finds that she had many.

The Failure of American Secularism

How the secular movement underestimated the endurance of religion.
Two men holding picture of alien toward camera

Making Sense of Heaven’s Gate

An excerpt from the new anthology, “American Cult.”
Sly Stone performing in front of crowd

What the Harlem Cultural Festival Represented

Questlove’s debut as a director, the documentary "Summer of Soul," revisits a musical event that encapsulated the energies of Harlem in the 1960s.
Collage of sexual freethinkers with a book, a gavel, and a bra.

The Radical Women Who Paved the Way for Free Speech and Free Love

Anthony Comstock’s crusade against vice constrained the lives of ordinary Americans. His antagonists opened up history for feminists and other activists.
Illustration of Henry Brown in a box

Rare Ephemera Shows Legacy of Henry "Box" Brown

In his day, Brown was a celebrated stage magician who incorporated performance into his lectures on abolitionism in the United States and England.
A "trick" photograph of a woman holding six heads

Snap Judgment

A brief history of trick photography.
Mary Todd Lincoln posing with two of her young children

Mary Lincoln Wasn’t ‘Crazy.’ She Was a Bereaved Mother, New Exhibit Says.

The Lincolns had four sons. Mary buried three of them. A new exhibit at President Lincoln's Cottage sheds light on bereaved parents, then and now.
Abraham Lincoln

Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

Revisionist biographers have given us countless perspectives, from Honest Abe to Killer Lincoln. Is there a version that’s true to his time and attuned to ours?
Photograph of Sun Ra by Ming Smith

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

Sun Ra, a seminal artist of afrofuturism, embraced a unique vision of blackness.

Mesmerism, (Im)propriety, and Power Over Women’s Bodies

How mesmerism threatened early 19th-century gendered constructs of virtue and honor.

Zombie Flu: How the 1919 Influenza Pandemic Fueled the Rise of the Living Dead

Did mass graves in the influenza pandemic help give rise to the living dead?

Fine Specimens

How Walt Whitman became the quintessential poet of disability and death.

Meet Mr. Mumler, the Man Who “Captured” Lincoln’s Ghost on Camera

When America’s first aerial cameraman met an infamous spirit photographer, the chemistry was explosive.
Harriet Beecher Stowe imagining her characters.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Art of Persuasion

Stowe’s novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the institution.

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