“[A] river that carried all kinds of people and pulled them together in going the same direction. And it did it quickly, it did it efficiently, it did it without as much argument or friction.” — Jimmy Collier. By Will Bostwick. (Sept. 4, 2018)

When a young writer and activist named Stetson Kennedy decided to expose the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, he looked to a certain superhero for inspiration. By Mark Juddery. (Oct. 31, 2009)

We don’t think of Poe as a veteran writer, but his brief stint in the U.S. Army was gloriously successful—until the court martial. By Brian Van Reet.

Alerts had been going out for weeks that conditions in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas were perfect for wildfires. On March 6, 2017, the prairie went up in flames. By Ian Frazier.

For some students, A People’s History will be the only history book they read. What does it teach them? By Sam Wineburg.

The United States shows all the warning signs of impending social and political collapse. By Stephen Marche.

What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987?

Stone Mountain has been called “a blight” upon the state of Georgia. But to others it is a key part of Southern heritage.

Donald Trump has said quite a few bizarre things. He now thinks he knows something about American history. As usual, he’s delusional.

These mail-order dwellings democratized homebuying, one kit at a time

When Shelton Laurel and the Appalachian war are mentioned at all, they are too often perceived as an exception, wiped off with a “war's hell” or blamed on the ways of those peculiar mountain folks. By David Forbes.

I was raised to venerate Lee the principled patriot—but I want no association with Lee the defender of slavery.

Ten years after the American economy nearly pitched itself into the abyss, financial elites are again banking on ignorance and incompetence. By Chris Lehmann.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and Best Products is having a sale.

Norma Rae was a lie. By Nick Martin.

In most cases, often for legal reasons and fear of reprisals from unions, industry officials denied the existence of a formal blacklist. Instead, the entertainment industries relied on lists compiled by such private citizen groups as… By Richard A. Schwartz.

Migration and a global shipping network have flattened biodiversity worldwide.

The world of invention is famous for its patent disputes. But what happens when your dispute wasn’t with another inventor but whether the Patent Office saw you as a person at all? In 1864, a black man named Benjamin T. Montgomery tried to patent his new propeller for steamboats. The Patent Office said that he wasn’t allowed to patent his invention. All because he was enslaved.

Some presidential estates and other historical sites have struggled to reconcile founding-era exceptionalism with the true story of America’s original sin.

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Starting in the 1940s, Indian immigrants built a hospitality industry that their children and grandchildren have turned into an empire.

Two Civil War words tend to bring everyone’s blood to the boiling point: George McClellan.

A pear seedling selection named Bradford was cloned by the gazillion to become the ubiquitous street tree of America’s postwar suburban expansion. Then it turned invasive. By Adrian Higgins.

Few democracies require children to make a daily declaration of fealty to country. By Jack David Eller.

Tobacco companies spurred the mania, but artistry won the hearts of collectors

In September 1868, Southern white Democrats hunted down around 200 African-Americans in an effort to suppress voter turnout

Newly declassified documents show why the Americans and the Soviets came so close to war in 1973.

In the wake of a horrific mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a young white man with an apparent history of racism is accused of killing nine black people during Bible study at a church, many are calling for the removal of the Confederate flag on statehouse grounds in South Carolina's capital. But the politics are tricky for Republicans in this conservative state. Last year, six in 10 South Carolinians said the flag should stay.

During the Jim Crow era, traveling in the United States for African-Americans was difficult and often dangerous. Motels and restaurants didn’t have to serve you if they didn’t want to. “Sundown towns”—places where it was unsafe to be black at night—dotted the nation’s geography. If you were driving around the country, the only way to know if you were safe was by word-of-mouth.

Founded in 1790, the Patent Office aimed to put innovation and entrepreneurship within reach of every citizen. Now, 225 years later, protesters say an out-of-touch system is doing more the opposite.

On August 6, 1945, Eugene Cotton, a Lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps, wrote to his fiancée from his posting in California. Cotton was one of hundreds of thousands who, having left service in the European theater of the war, were slated to take part in a massive invasion of the Japanese islands in late 1945 and early 1946. He was 23 years old, a recent college graduate with a degree in physics, and had undergone training at both MIT and Berkeley before joining the Army...

Drought conditions in the Western part of the United States have allowed an old Nevada town once submerged deep beneath Lake Mead to emerge from its watery grave. Founded in 1865, St. Thomas was initially settled by Mormons drawn by Muddy Creek, a tributary that flows into the Colorado River, located 22 miles away. When the Mormons left in 1871, outlaws — including horse thieves and cattle rustlers— moved in. The town was eventually settled by people attracted by the region’s prime farming land.

There's a map making the rounds on Facebook right now, which is being shared as if it's a map of pre-contact North America. You can find it here. But it doesn't show pre-contact North America at all — it's trying to show what the boundaries of the First Nations & Inuit would look like in 2015 if contact had never happened. And it's not even an accurate representation of that alternative history: the borders it uses are borders that were formed, in part, as a result of European contact.