Mark Twain

It puts the people in the most peril in the center of the story: the people being systematically exploited, chained, whipped and raped.

Already prone to boiler explosions that regularly killed scores of passengers, steamboats were pushed to their limits in races that valued speed over safety.

Ken Burns’ account of prohibition tells a popular story of booze in America. The historical record is far more sobering.

A new history makes a case for the world-ordering power of wheat.

The iconic songwriter has transcended time and place for 60 years. What should that mean for the rest of us?

Digital archiving is shoddy and incomplete, and it will hamper the ability of future generations to understand the current era.

The Czech composer came to New York with the conviction that African-American melodies would be the ‘seedbed’ for their nation’s 20th-century music.

Julian Fellowes' new series dramatizes the late 19th-century clash between New York City's old and new monied elite.

'Did slavery make home always somewhere else?'

What turned Smedley Butler into a critic of American foreign policy?

The story of President Andrew Jackson's 1,400-pound block of cheese.

Despite its universalist claims, the field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion.

How the secular movement underestimated the endurance of religion.

Fearful of increasing participation, elites of the era attempted to rein in democracy.

A troubling TikTok conspiracy theory questions whether Keller was “real.”

Dorsey and Thomas amassed important collections at a time when the future of chattel slavery and Black life hung in the balance of a national quarrel.

Historical narratives of the United States have never not been shaped by an anxiety about the end of it all. Are we a new Rome or a new Zion?

Thomas Dixon’s racist discourse lurks in American politics and society even today.

The long and complicated life of Kipling's famous poem.

What happened to the great defender of Empire when he settled in the States?