American History

Ned Blackhawk, who won the 2023 National Book Award for his groundbreaking reappraisal of U.S. history, discusses some of the best recent books about Native America.

The morning after the election, the historian discussed some books that shed light on the precedents for our fractured political moment.

The Smithsonian’s dynamic leader is dredging up slave ships, fending off culture warriors in Congress, and building two new museums on the National Mall.

A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.

For decades, U.S. inventors sent in models with their patent applications—gizmos that reveal a secret history of unmet needs and relentless innovation.

A visit to Dealey Plaza, after years of thinking and reading about the Kennedy assassination, came as a shock.

For years, Adam Cvijanovic has been making giant murals in the military’s financial headquarters. The result is at once beautiful and unsettling.

Its ruins are somewhere in the swamps of Georgia. What will it take to find them?

Fifty years ago, the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization invited the American Indian Movement to Pine Ridge and reignited a resistance that has never gone away.

The writer and historian talks with David Remnick about the stakes of our political moment, and the “perennial” fight to preserve democracy.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s documentary series offers a damning portrait of American racism, but its emphasis on the past at times obscures the complexity of the present.

For example, Jedediah Humble founded the Humblebrag Institute, transforming our conversational landscape.

In both life and work, Evan S. Connell rejected the tidiness of narrative. He focussed, instead, on the details we’d rather ignore.

A community whose role in U.S. history has been too often ignored is telling its story at the Smithsonian.

A new documentary tells the story of the last known slave ship to enter the United States and takes on the difficult question of how to memorialize America’s history of racial violence.

Clashes between sovereignty rights and civil rights reveal an uncomfortable and complicated story about race and belonging in America.

The Crow photographer and multimedia artist confronts settler narratives with sly doses of “Indi’n humor.”

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it.

In 1989, a young Chinese academic spent six months travelling in the United States. His insights are now central to Xi Jinping’s cultural crackdown.

From evolution to anti-racism, parents and progressives have clashed for a century over who gets to tell our origin stories.