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The Heartbreaking Love Letters That Spurred an Ohio Blacksmith to Join John...
Every October 16 marks the anniversary of John Brown’s historic raid on Harpers Ferry in West Virginia in 1859. Accompanied by 18 supporters, Brown, a radical abolitionist, hoped to seize the federal...
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Was Leland Stanford a ‘Magnanimous’ Philanthropist or a ‘Thief, Liar, and...
Born in his father’s East Coast backwoods bar, dying in a magnificent West Coast mansion built from his self-made fortune. Condemned as the complete robber-baron, consecrated as a singular titan of...
View ArticleThe Crusading Newsman Who Taught Americans to Give to the Poor
On May 10, 1900, the Navy steamship Quito sailed from Brooklyn, New York, to deliver 5,000 tons of corn and seeds to the “starving multitudes” of India. This “great work of rescue” was the brainchild...
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When Newspaper ‘Stereotypes’ Got Americans Laughing at the Same Jokes
From today’s vantage point, when many American cities struggle to sustain even a single print newspaper, the early decades of the 20th century look like glory days for local papers. Even small cities...
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The Woolen Shoes That Made Revolutionary-Era Women Feel Patriotic
If you were a wealthy or middle-class woman living in British America around the time of the Revolution, you probably owned a pair of calamanco shoes. Like sneakers or black pumps today, calamancos...
View ArticleWhen Americans Bought the Illusion of ‘Indoor-Outdoor Living’
Think of postwar America, and what often comes to mind is a white, heterosexual family, pictured in a domestic suburban environment. You can tell this family lives in the suburbs because there is a...
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The Ornery, Freethinking Astrophysicist Who Helped Start the Space Race
When the young physicist Fritz Zwicky arrived in America in 1925, the universe was a tidy place. Some educated people still believed the Sun was at the center of everything and that our little...
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The Communal, Sometimes Celibate, 19th-Century Ohio Town That Thrived for...
Quaint, rural, and hardworking, Zoar, Ohio, is the kind of place that wasn’t supposed to thrive in America. The citizens of Zoar came to this country as religious dissenters in the early 19th century....
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The Postage Stamps That Flew Amelia Earhart Across the World
Americans looking to bankroll adventures in the early 20th century had to get creative. Expeditions were not cheap, and even wealthy individuals needed financial assistance to pay for equipment and...
View ArticleThe 21-Year-Old Norwegian Immigrant Who Started Life Over by Homesteading...
In the photograph a young woman sits all alone on the prairie. The sky is big, the horizon low. She is in front of a modest building: a tiny shack of planked wood, covered with tar paper. A flat,...
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