Back in the days when only aristocrats and spiritual leaders could hold political and cultural authority, there was no pride in claiming to be self-made. Instead, an assertion of self-made success was ...

Elizabeth R. Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia, and author of six books, most recently Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the ...

Marina Manoukian is a writer and artist. She received her Masters in English Philology at Freie Universität Berlin. A Ford truck is loaded with ivory tusks in Essex, Connecticut, 19th century.

Will Teague is an instructor in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas. Students demonstrating against the Shah of Iran, Washington, DC, 1979. Photograph by Marion S. Trikosko.

Barbara Weinstein is professor of Latin American History at NYU. In 2007, she served as president of the American Historical Association. Her books include The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920, and The ...

James A.S. Sunderland is a Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge and a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. His DPhil, from Merton College, Oxford, ...

An engraving attributing John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln to the influence of Knights of the Golden Circle. [Library of Congress] In the summer of 1859, several stock actors from ...

Santiago Flórez is a bilingual Colombian journalist, educator, illustrator, and anthropologist based in New York City. Currently, he works at Science Friday. He has an MA in bilingual journalism from ...

Perhaps the greatest side plot in Season 3 of Netflix’s Bridgerton involves the sexual education of the Featherington sisters. Overbearing mama Lady Portia Featherington (Polly Walker) is desperate ...

Timothy Messer-Kruse is author of Patriots’ Dilemma: White Abolitionism and Black Banishment in the Founding of the United States of America. Study For Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, or The ...

Drowning rates were abysmally high in early 20th-century America, with as many as ten thousand adults and children meeting watery graves each year. Beaches and swimming holes were unguarded, and those ...

Zachary Jonathan Jacobson is the author of On Nixon’s Madness: An Emotional History (March 2023). Richard Nixon discusses Vietnam with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Deputy National ...