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Folk Music Artists Who Shaped the American Sound
How singers who learned songs by heart built the music America argues about.
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Why the 1920s Still Feel Like Our Decade
The Census Bureau counted 106,021,537 Americans in 1920, the first count above 100 million and the first with a majority-urban population, while KDKA and The Jazz Singer built the mass audience of modern culture.
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American Dream Myth: The Myth of the Self-Made American
Mobility research shows most Americans stay near the income level they are born into, a finding that complicates the national myth of the self-made man.
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Route 66 History: The Hidden History of Route 66
Assembled from existing roads in 1926 and retired in 1985, Route 66 carried Dust Bowl families west and left behind motels, songs, and a scenic byway.
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Changing Churches — How Americans Choose a Congregation — and Why Switching Is More Common Than Ever
Americans have always shopped for congregations. From colonial dissenters to the accelerating religious switching behind today's unaffiliated boom, choosing a faith is a national habit.
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Self Help Books — Self-Help Before the Shelf: How America Invented the Improvement Book
Long before paperbacks, Americans were writing advice books. From Franklin's almanack to Dale Carnegie, the history of self-help books runs deeper than you think.
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The Society Hands Its Design Story To Sandy Lu — And A Decade Gets A Second Draft
A studio built on storytelling picks a leader whose method is listening first.
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Prohibition History: How Prohibition Accidentally Modernized America
The dry era was meant to restore an older moral order. Instead it built the federal machinery, the nightlife and the policing habits we still live with.
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Frontier Myth American Culture: Why the Frontier Still Haunts American Storytelling
The line closed in 1890. The stories never got the memo — and American film and fiction have been running on frontier fuel ever since.