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.