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: 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 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.