Livia Gershon

The city's prosperity grew from a system that trafficked human beings and turned their lives into profit.

Academics and media turned “machismo” into a cultural stereotype during the Cold War.

A century ago, new technology and mobility reshaped what it meant to be young, linking rural life more closely to the city.

Popular resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law and “Slave Power” helped forge a new electoral force.

Economic self-interest shaped how New Yorkers responded to British taxes and imperial crackdowns.

How did the Ku Klux Klan spread across the South? Part of its journey depended on a code for secret correspondence.

In colonial America, government “thanksgivings” blurred faith and politics. For Quakers, rejecting them was an act of religious conviction.

The term “white trash” once was used to disparage poor white people. In the Civil Rights era, its meaning shifted to support business-friendly racial politics.

The popular musical poses Alexander Hamilton as a symbol of the value of immigrants brought to America, but over time, his party became increasingly xenophobic.

French Canadians held a distinct position in an American labor landscape in which experts viewed different “races” as being suited to different kinds of work.

Lesbian relationships among government workers were seen as a threat to national security in the 1950s. But what was a lesbian relationship?

At the time of the Civil War, many Americans revered the nation’s Founding Fathers, and both supporters and opponents of slavery recruited them to their sides.

Leading up to a 2004 debate about same-sex marriage, conservatives shifted their focus away from moral issues and toward arguments about children’s welfare.

Italian immigrants had no qualms about working and living alongside Black Americans, which made them targets for violence by white vigilantes in Louisiana.

Activists including W. E .B. Du Bois in the United States and Lajpat Rai in India drew connections between Black American and Indian experiences of white rule.

The peach industry represented a new, scientifically driven economy for Georgia, but it also depended on the rhythms and racial stereotypes of cotton farming.

Concerns about privacy and pressures regarding the physical appearance of women and their homes contributed to the failure of AT&T’s 1960s Picturephone.

The medical profession saw nothing wrong with offering a cocaine-laced cola to white, middle-class consumers. Selling it to Black Americans was another matter.

Advertising went from being an embarrassing activity to a legitimate part of every company’s business plans—despite scant evidence that it worked.

At the height of circus animal acts in the late nineteenth century, animals who killed their captors might be publicly executed for their “crimes.”

As more Black men gained the right to vote in New York, the state began to change its laws to reduce their power or disenfranchise them completely.

In the 1960s and ’70s, guides began wearing period costumes and farming with historical techniques, a change that coincided with the back-to-the-land movement.

As the United States prepared to enter World War I, the government created the first modern state propaganda office, the Committee on Public Information.

The history of garbage dumps is the history of America.