Place

How the patron saint of progressive urban planning’s ideas and ideals were implemented – and corrupted.

Climate disaster at Wounded Knee.

Border wall construction is encroaching on a site where people from many cultures have interacted for thousands of years.

How history forgot Felipe and Vivián Espinosa, two of the American West’s most brutal killers—and the complicated story behind their murderous rampage.

For nearly 200 years after the founding of New York, the city struggled to establish a clean source of fresh water.

An excerpt from a new book reveals how Disneyland came to be.

A personal account of how one young woman travels to South Carolina in search of her family history and freedom narrative.

How one monument came to be at the center of Minnesota’s imagined white past.

Reflections on monuments and public art in Newark, New Jersey.

The University of Virginia was supposed to transform a slave-owning generation, but it failed.

In six weeks, 12,000 were dead of influenza.

What an episode of anti-Chinese mob violence in 1885 has to to teach us in today’s era of nativism and ICE raids.

After an African-American cemetery was bulldozed, families wondered what happened to the graves.

What is Texas? Should we even think about so large and diverse a place as having an essence that can be distilled?

America’s racialized topography means African-American historical sites are especially vulnerable to climate change.

A battle over local control in a city that was the face of integration shows the extent of the new segregation problem in the U.S.

Many people think of the White House as a symbol of democracy, but it also embodies America’s complicated past.

Twenty years ago my hometown made national headlines when the local college staged an internationally acclaimed play about gay men and the AIDS crisis.

The North Carolina Klan thought burning crosses would scare the Lumbee tribe out of Robeson County. That’s not how things went down.

Hundreds of ancient Native American sites along the Gulf Coast are at risk.

Ninety years ago, young African Americans in the South took up the Lindy Hop. It was an act of resistance and an assertion of freedom.

Lizabeth Cohen on the poverty and prosperity of the American city.

A brief history of theater fires in New York City—and the regulations that helped people escape them.

In America’s bloody history of racial violence, the little-known Elaine Massacre may rank as the deadliest.

Charlottesville and the UVA were enthusiastic participants in the national resurgence of public and celebratory white supremacy.

The Mic-O-Say was founded in 1925, under the leadership of Harold Roe Bartle, a two-term Kansas City mayor known in his social circles as ‘Chief.’

"You can't disentangle blackness and California."

Why some journalists amassed reams of data and published thousands of pages to promote their home cities.

Today, it’s a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments.

America was built by the labor of stolen African bodies, on stolen Native American lands.