Matthew Wills

The magazine’s explosive growth mirrored the nation's emergence as a global empire.

Families turned to habeas corpus to recover enlisted sons, forcing a constitutional showdown over military power.

A Civil War-era push for unity helped transform a little-known geographic boundary into a powerful symbol of American identity.

Amid the fraud and flimflam of early drug markets, Shakers stood for purity, creating a brand others were eager to exploit.

Early robots in the US evolved from symbols of revolt into racialized figures tied to labor and the legacy of slavery.

Twisting waters once blurred the boundary, but twentieth-century engineering turned the Rio Grande into a fixed, policed line.

Railroad photography helped sell an “empty” American West—carefully framing out the people already living there.

In the 1970s, sensors and computers turned the US–Mexico border into a testing ground for automated control.

Reports on the May 1960 downing of an American U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union offer a case study in Cold War posturing and misdirection.

The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.

James R. Schlesinger was only head of the CIA for six months, but he nevertheless ranks as the least popular director in the agency’s history.

International relations and foreign influence helped end legal segregation of Mexican American students in California after World War II.

Historians are recovering the overlooked history of North America’s Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake.

The private boxes for the privileged few in today’s baseball stadiums are nothing new.

Investigators never reached a conclusion about the death of Pullman porter J. H. Wilkins, but his killing revealed much about the dangers of his profession.

To reduce Virginia’s use of the death penalty, Thomas Jefferson proposed using permanent disfigurement as a punishment for rape, polygamy, and sodomy.

Letters, diaries, and remembrances shared on JSTOR by University of the Pacific reveal the hardships of day-to-day life during the California Gold Rush.

The genesis of the United Nations came from the nations united as Allies against the Axis powers, but who really pushed the institution into being?

During the Great Depression, financial elites translated European fascism into an American form that joined high capital with lower middle-class populism.

We can thank the postal service for establishing the foundations of the American tradition of communications confidentiality.

The Postal Savings System offered depositors a US government-backed guarantee of security, but it was undone by for-profit private banks.

Three US presidents from the South’s borders—Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson—worked against Southern politicians to support civil and voting rights.

The defining of corporations as legal “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment rights got a leg up from the fight over a California anti-Chinese immigrant law.

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.