Sugar has deep links with slavery in the US, but Black workers weren’t the only ones affected. In post-Civil War Louisiana, Chinese workers also toiled cutting and processing cane.
If you picture Santa Claus as plump and jolly and pulled by reindeer, you may have this poem to thank.
Clement Clark Moore/New-York Historical Society
‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’ is one of the most famous American poems. But who wrote it?
Parents and activists who support transgender rights rally before a school board meeting on Aug. 10, 2021, in Ashburn, Virginia.
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The ongoing debate over transgender rights in rural America frames transness as a nascent movement, ignoring a long undercurrent of transgender history that is all but forgotten.
These statues of enslaved young boys are part of a modern-day depiction of southern plantation life at the Whitney Museum in Louisiana.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
The romanticized notions of Southern gentility are increasingly at odds with historical reality as the lives, culture and contributions of the enslaved are becoming integral on tours of plantations.
You never know where Uncle Sam will make an appearance.
David McNew/Getty Images
Women’s rights activists used maps to highlight which regions hadn’t given women the vote: we can use the same tactics to push climate action.
Native Americans are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crime than the U.S. population as a whole.
Michael Siluk/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Thousands of cases of missing and murdered Native Americans remain unsolved. A scarcity of reliable data is only part of the problem, a tribal justice scholar explains.
A dairy barn in Waitsfield, Vermont, built circa 1890.
Thomas Visser
A Western scholar proposes allocating water from the Colorado River based on percentages of its actual flow instead of fixed amounts that exceed what’s there – and including tribes this time.
French officer Alfred Dreyfus spent five years as a prisoner on Devil’s Island, off the coast of South America.
Roger Viollet Collection via Getty Images
Alton Levy may not be a household name today, but his court-martial put a spotlight on unequal treatment in the military.
A gun rights advocate walks through the rotunda of the Kentucky Capitol. Some lawyers argue that the 1689 English Bill of Rights created the legal basis for public carry of weapons in the U.S.
Bryan Woolston/Getty Images
Many gun rights advocates claim that the right to carry guns is a universal right that has spanned centuries and nations. History tells a different story.
Children and parents lined up for polio vaccines outside a Syracuse, New York school in 1961.
AP Photo
Public health experts know that schools are likely sites for the spread of disease, and laws tying school attendance to vaccination go back to the 1800s.
Voting rights activists protest voter restriction laws being passed in states across the country, in Washington, D.C., July 15, 2021.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Americans tend to think of diversity in demographic terms, but it has a qualitative element to it that reflects a fundamental battle between segregation and integration.
A man fishes the head of a statue of Queen Victoria from the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg. Her statue and a statue of Queen Elizabeth were toppled and vandalized on Canada Day.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kelly Geraldine Malone
Movements that challenge former national icons demonstrate the importance of history-making in an age of racial reconciliation. But ‘history wars’ won’t get us anywhere.
Indigenous Peoples Day is celebrated in many states across the U.S.
grandriver/E+ via Getty Images
A growing number of states are recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day on what has traditionally been Columbus Day. An education scholar weighs in on what this means for America’s schools.
The first reading of the Declaration of Independence in Boston, July 18, 1776.
Tichnor Brothers Collection, Boston Public Library via Digital Commonwealth
Abolition in the UK tends to focus on the work of Yorkshireman William Wilberforce but there were many Black abolitionists whose tireless work has been forgotten.
Before satellites, fire crews watched for smoke from fire towers across the national forests.
K. D. Swan, U.S. Forest Service
William Deverell, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences e Elizabeth A. Logan, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The US has learned that it cannot suppress its way to a healthy relationship with fire in the West. That strategy failed, even before climate change proved it to be no strategy at all.
A survey of U.S. history teachers found they teach about 9/11 primarily on the date of the anniversary.
Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images
The 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is an opportunity for teachers to focus less on recreating the day and more on what students can learn from it, two curriculum experts argue.