History
How Drive-In Theaters Conquered America and Vanished
A Camden parking lot experiment from 1933 grew into more than 4,000 outdoor screens by the late 1950s, then melted down to a few hundred survivors, most of them beloved.
History: Archives and Context
American history examined through archives, monuments, correspondence and the movements that textbooks compress into a sentence. Each piece explains how a past decision still shapes an argument being had today. Written for readers who want historical detail rather than a moral delivered in advance.
History
The World's Fairs That Redrew the American Imagination
Chicago 1893 and New York 1939 sold two different futures to two generations of Americans, and both futures, remarkably, arrived.
History
The Chautauqua Movement, Explained
For half a century, an educational summer camp on a lake in western New York grew into a national habit of tents, lecturers, and self-improvement that reached thousands of towns a year.
History
When Small Towns Built Opera Houses
In the decades after the Civil War, thousands of American farm towns put up buildings they grandly called opera houses, and for a while the bookings actually came.
History
How the Federal Art Project Painted America
Between 1935 and 1943, a New Deal agency put thousands of American artists on the public payroll and quietly rebuilt the country's visual culture from the county courthouse to the city subway.