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Illustration of a coastline with indications of industry and farming

Human History and the Hunger for Land

From Bronze Age farmers to New World colonialists, the stories of struggle to claim more ground have shaped where and how we live.
Trump at a podium campaigning.
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1846 — Not 1861 — Reminds Us Why Seceding Won’t Work For Disgruntled Trump Supporters

Trump fans are better off as Americans.
A covered wagon in the grass.

The Deadly Temptation of the Oregon Trail Shortcut

Dying of dysentery was just the beginning.
flag of the Cherokee Nation

The 17-Year-Old Girl Who Was Once a Leader of The Cherokee Nation

Nanyehi “Nancy” Ward tried to broker peace with white settlers.

What Tecumseh Fought For

Pursuing a Native alliance powerful enough to resist the American invaders, the Shawnee leader and his prophet brother envisioned a new and better Indian world.
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.
A boat landing in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Where the Waters Meet the People: A Bibliography of the Twin Cities

St. Paul and Minneapolis have a history as long, deep, and twisted as the Mississippi River.
The Equestrian statue, depicting a man on a horse.

The Racist History Behind El Paso’s XII Travelers Memorial

Protesters in El Paso have focused on toppling The Equestrian, a monument to a racist colonizer. But the story behind the monument goes deeper.
Wabanaki people paddling canoes near bridge

The Myth of Native American Extinction Harms Everyone

Cluelessness about Native people is rampant in New England, which romanticizes its Colonial heritage.
Captain Medorem Crawford pictured with his brother, LeRoy, who he employed as his assistant on the Emigrant Escort Service expeditions in 1862-4

A White Man’s Empire

The United Stated Emigrant Escort Service and settler colonialism during the Civil War.

Was El Monte Really Founded by White Pioneers?

A new book explores the history of the people who have been written out of the L.A. suburb's longtime origin story.
Historical marker in Artillery Park.

Cast in Iron?

Rethinking our historical monuments.
Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
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The West Is Relevant to Our Long History of Anti-Blackness, Not Just the South

Revisiting the Missouri Compromise should transform how we think about white American expansion.
Sketch of colonial fur traders and Indigenous people in a canoe.

The Untold Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company

A look back at the early years of the 350-year-old institution that once claimed a vast portion of the globe.

A War for Settler Colonialism

Refocusing the study of the Civil War on the West shows that events out west were not simply “noteworthy”; they were emblematic.

American Torture

For 400 years, Americans have argued that their violence is justified while the violence of others constitutes barbarism.

Slavery, and American Racism, Were Born in Genocide

Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that Imperial expansion over stolen Indian land shaped and deepened the American Revolution’s relationship to slavery.

Land of the Free

The story of America is precisely the heroic story of pioneers who bring the American ideal again and again to the West.

The Long-Forgotten Vigilante Murders of the San Luis Valley

How history forgot Felipe and Vivián Espinosa, two of the American West’s most brutal killers—and the complicated story behind their murderous rampage.

The Invention of Thanksgiving

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

The Legend of Big Ole

How one monument came to be at the center of Minnesota’s imagined white past.
African-American cowboys in Bonham, Texas, circa 1913

The Real Texas

What is Texas? Should we even think about so large and diverse a place as having an essence that can be distilled?

The Mild, Mild West

H.W. Brands' new one-volume history of the American West reads too much like a movie we’ve already seen.

How We Think About the Term 'Enslaved' Matters

The first Africans who came to America in 1619 were not ‘enslaved’, they were indentured – and this is a crucial difference.

Unearthing the Complex Histories of Madison Parks

Creating the city's bucolic, natural landscapes required a good deal of displacement, technological intervention, and erasure.

It Isn’t Independence Day For Everyone

If the British had won the Revolutionary War, things might be very different for Native Americans.
The signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux depicted by painter Francis David Millet in 1885.

Dakota Uprooted: Capitalism, Resilience, and the U.S.-Dakota War

White American empire transformed Minnesota into an agricultural and extraction-based economy that uprooted Dakota from their traditional homelands.

No Man’s Land

In ignoring the messy realities of westward expansion, McCullough’s "The Pioneers" is both incomplete and dull.
Street sign for Flatville, surrounded by flat agricultural fields.

The View from the Middle of Everything

Dispatches From Flatville, Illinois.

Mass Incarceration Didn't Start with the War on Crime

A review of "City of Inmates" by Kelly Lytle Hernández.

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