Popular culture often describes scalping − the forceful removing of a person’s scalp − as an indigenous practice. But white settlers accelerated this form of violence against Native Americans.
During President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, many Congressional Democrats stood and clapped, but the GOP did not.
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
Americans are not the first to fret over the potential harm that parties can inflict. But parties can also promote the common interest.
An 1877 print called ‘Concord - The First Blow For Liberty,’ showing American patriots going off to fight the British on April 19, 1775.
Print Collector/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Fuel for the American Revolution came from a source familiar today: distorted news reports used to drum up enthusiasm for overthrowing an illegitimate government.
As a printer’s apprentice in 1721, Franklin had a front-row seat to the controversy around a new prevention technique.
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When Bostonians in 1721 faced a deadly smallpox outbreak, a new procedure called inoculation was found to help fend off the disease. Not everyone was won over, and newspapers fed the controversy.
Stratford Hall in Westmoreland, Virginia, where enslaved cook and chocolatier Caesar lived and worked in the kitchen.
Wikipedia
There’s a bittersweet history to chocolate in America. At one plantation museum in Virginia, the story of enslaved chocolatier Caesar shows the oppression that lay behind the elite’s culinary treat.
Freed slaves on the plantation of Confederate General Thomas F. Drayton in Hilton Head, South Carolina. This photograph was taken circa 1865.
Getty Images / CORBIS
Modern dating techniques are providing new time frames for indigenous settlements in Northeast North America, free from the Eurocentric bias that previously led to incorrect assumptions.
A 1620 engraving depicts tobacco being prepared for export from Jamestown, Virginia.
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Peter C. Mancall, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
When the founders wrote the Constitution, they had to devise a punishment fitting for a civil servant’s impeachment. One possible punishment: banishment from the community.
Seventy-eight percent of the people executed for witchcraft in New England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries were women.
Jef Thompson/Shutterstock.com
With levels of political discourse reaching new lows, some might say the country could use a dose of shame and humility. At the same time, social media have unleashed a torrent of online shaming.
Franklin’s lifelong quest was spreading scientific knowledge to regular people.
Mason Chamberlin
Franklin advanced a scientific – not supernatural – understanding of astronomical events such as eclipses. His satirical character ‘Poor Richard’ mocked those who bought into astrological predictions.