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Articles on US history

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Mural at Rockaway Brewing Company in Long Island City, Queens, New York, a longtime industrial and transportation hub that now is rapidly redeveloping. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

What lies beneath: To manage toxic contamination in cities, study their industrial histories

Many homes, parks and businesses in US cities stand on former manufacturing sites that may have left legacy hazardous wastes behind. A new book calls for more research into our urban industrial past.
Donald Trump and Paul Manafort in 2016. Mark Reinstein/MediaPunch /IPX

Will Trump pardon Manafort?

Presidents past have used a nearly limitless power of pardon to halt criminal prosecutions before. What’s to stop Trump?
‘Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor’ by William Halsall (1882). Pilgrim Hall Museum

Why the Pilgrims were actually able to survive

The Pilgrims repeatedly thanked God for their good fortune. But without two earlier developments, the entire undertaking at New Plymouth would have likely failed.
Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to seven people, including former NFL quarterback Roger Staubach. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

What Trump’s picks for the Presidential Medal of Freedom say about him

Researchers have analyzed data from the last 50 years of medals to learn what presidents consider important and what legacy they hope to leave behind.
The Fort Hood military base in Killeen, Texas. AP Photo/ Tamir Kalifa

10 US military bases are named after Confederate generals

In scrutinizing statues honoring Confederate figures, journalists have overlooked military bases named after generals who fought to defend the slavery of black people.
John F. Kennedy’s assassination shocked the world in the 1960s and arguably played a part in the rise of Donald Trump today. Abbie Rowe/AAP

World politics explainer: the assassination of John F. Kennedy

The reverberations of JFK’s assassination can still be felt to this day in the paranoid and racialised politics of the American right
Prison jobs are always low paid, often difficult, and produce many of the foodstuffs and services many Americans use every day. Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

Prisoner strike exposes an age old American reliance on forced labor

Enslaved workers used to grow cotton and mill flour. Now prisoners grind beef and crate eggs. Here, a historian explores Americans’ troubling habit of consuming the products of slave labor.
The 2016 Maple fire (photographed in July 2017) reburned young forests that had regenerated after the 1988 Yellowstone fires. More frequent high-severity fires are expected in the future as climate warms, which may change patterns of forest recovery. Monica Turner

Here’s how forests rebounded from Yellowstone’s epic 1988 fires – and why that could be harder in the future

Huge fires roared through Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1988, scorching one-third of the park. Since then the park has been a valuable lab for studying how forests recover from fires.
Alex Jones speaks during a rally for candidate Donald Trump near the Republican National Convention in July 2016. Reuters/Lucas Jackson

Audiences love the anger: Alex Jones, or someone like him, will be back

Confrontational characters spouting conspiracy theories and fringe ideas have been around since American broadcasting began. With Alex Jones banished from the web, someone else will take his place.
‘Early Days.’ Detail of Frank Happersberger’s pioneer monument, San Francisco, California, 1894. Photo by Lisa Allen. Cynthia Prescott

Think Confederate monuments are racist? Consider pioneer monuments

Many cities are removing their Confederate statues. But pioneer monuments represent a racist past, too. There are at least 200 of them, and their future is now being debated.

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