Rebecca Blackwell/AAP
Trump and the movement behind him is both new and old. Times are unprecedented but also, to historians of America, frighteningly familiar. Nick Bryant’s book excavates that history.
Black demonstrators walk to work during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., in February 1956.
Don Cravens/Getty Images
By putting financial pressure on white businesses – often in a highly organized way – Black civil rights leaders achieved social change.
A stamp printed with a Thomas Jefferson quotation in 1960.
AlexanderZam/iStock via Getty Images Plus
More than 2,000 letters between the two founders are available online. Many attest to their deep commitment to religious freedom.
Historians are coming out of the archives and sharing their expertise.
uschools/Getty Images
Lawyers, advocacy groups and think tanks are soliciting historians’ expertise on the history underlying certain Supreme Court cases. Yet this history-for-hire approach raises questions.
Drawing shows men making shoes at the Philadelphia Almshouse, circa 1899.
Alice Barber Stephens/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Alfred Bendiner Memorial Collection
Amid rising unemployment, inflation and poverty in the 1830s, Philadelphia taxpayers believed welfare scammers were bleeding coffers dry. Poor lists from 1829 show they were wrong.
A colorized engraving depicts enslavers selling enslaved people in the 19th-century South.
Corbis via Getty Images
Human bondage was big business in the antebellum US, and men weren’t the only ones cashing in.
Members of E Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment approach the Normandy beaches in the first wave of the D-Day invasion.
National Park Service
In the first wave to hit the beach, troops were met by withering German gunfire. But they kept pushing and established a small beachhead from which the invasion could continue.
Demonstrators display a call for Christian nationalism at the Jan. 6, 2021, ‘Stop the Steal’ rally that preceded the storming of the Capitol.
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
Flagpoles outside homes owned by Justice Samuel Alito have displayed symbols used by Trump supporters and Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
Immigrant children at Ellis Island in New York, 1908.
National Archives/Wikimedia Commons
May 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply cut the number of people allowed into the US.
Educator Mary McLeod Bethune regularly wrote of her travels abroad.
Robert Abbott Sengstacke via Getty Images
A former archivist at Mary McLeod Bethune’s last residence in Washington, DC, recounts how the experience led her to see Bethune as a global figure.
One of war photographer Robert Capa’s images shows a wave of troops arriving on the Normandy beaches on D-Day.
Robert Capa via National Museum of American History
Artifacts held in the National Museum of American History provide personal details about the Normandy invasion.
‘The Travellers’ Tour Through the United States’ is the earliest known board game to depict a map of North America.
Library of Congress
Few copies remain of the earliest known board game produced in the US.
An Acela, the flagship train of the Northeast corridor, moves through Connecticut.
AP Photo/Michael Dwyer
Love it or hate it, the ‘Acela Corridor’ has developed a widely recognized identity thanks to the trains that link it together.
A KKK rally in Dayton, Ohio, on Sept. 21, 1923.
Dayton Metro Library
Most of the Klan’s victims were African American, but many other groups have been targeted during the hate group’s century and a half of history.
Take your cuppa elsewhere.
iStock/Getty Images Plus
Two and a half centuries later, some things haven’t changed.
Under cover of night, Colonists boarded the ships, dumped the tea chests and sparked a revolution.
Hulton Fine Art Collection/Art Images via Getty Images
An attack on private property angered Colonial leaders as much as the British public – but a strong reaction from Parliament hardened the positions of the opposing sides, making compromise impossible.
Merchandise is locked in cases to guard against theft in a Target store in New York City on Sept. 23, 2023.
Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Shoplifting has been hyped as a driver of chain-store closures, but did these companies ever really understand urban environments in the first place?
Birders participate in the Christmas Bird Count on Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, D.C., Dec. 16, 2017.
Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images
What’s in a name? A lot, if you’re an Audubon’s Oriole or a Townsend’s Solitaire.
A typical New England stone wall in Hebron, Conn.
Robert M. Thorson
New England has thousands of miles of stone walls. A geoscientist explains why analyzing them scientifically is a solid step toward preserving them
Bulldozed land at the planned site of a controversial police training facility, with Atlanta in the distance.
Cheney Orr/AFP via Getty Images
This isn’t the first time that US authorities have criminalized civil disobedience or framed grassroots organizing as a conspiracy.