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 ...

Timothy Messer-Kruse is professor of cultural studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His latest book is Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution. Abbot Academy ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Chris Monday is associate professor of Russian History at Dongseo University, South Korea. In 1949, Mikhail Putin visits a worker club at the Red Vyborzhets factory in Leningrad with his former ...

Elena Conis is a historian of medicine at Berkeley and the author of Vaccine Nation (Chicago, 2015) and the forthcoming book How to Sell a Poison (Bold Type, 2022). Many Americans have run out of ...

Donne Levy is a retired community college history instructor. In the mid-1970s, the religious right became heavily involved in electoral politics and a driving force within the Republican Party. By ...