Peter S. Onuf

A discussion of the patriotic attempt to spurn European fashion and spin cloth at home in the time leading up to the Revolutionary War.

Nasology was a 19th century pseudoscience which claimed to explain personality traits based on the shape of a person’s nose.

When the federal government began to claim a stake in the public’s physical fitness, and the origins of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.

On the 1870s skirmish between John D. Rockefeller and the upstart competitors who built the country’s first long-distance oil pipeline.

How the mythologizing of the Union Army’s Irish Brigade helped dispel anti-Irish sentiment.

Women in the workplace, from 19th century domestic workers to the Rosies of World War II to the labs of Silicon Valley.

Syracuse University Geography professor Matt Huber discusses the 1930s oil boom in the American southwest, and the military might brought in to control it.

Using oral histories of early East Texas oil workers, recorded in the 1950s, we hear about the chaos and excess that accompanied the discovery of oil.

Tracing the evolution of Christmas from a drunken carnival to the peaceful, family-oriented, consumeristic ritual we celebrate today.

A time before “everyone” knew the story of Christopher Columbus, and the role of Washington Irving’s massive biography in creating the heroic Columbus myth.

An author's search for the "real" Christopher Columbus.

Columbus Day is here again -- along with the controversy over its namesake. How have earlier generations understood him?

On violence and disorder in the early years of UVA, and the threat it posed to Thomas Jefferson’s vision for American higher education.

Caroline Winterer tells Peter about a debate over practicality and purpose in higher education after the Civil War, and how the humanities offered a solution.

On the legal background to the federal minimum wage, established by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

On the phenomenon of “hiring out” enslaved persons prior to the Civil War, and how this introduced some slaves to the world of wages.

Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech is widely known as one of the greatest abolitionist speeches ever.

An explanation of the Manhattan Company, a bank disguised as a municipal water corporation that helped to transform Early Republican politics.

On factional strife in the Early Republic, and why parties themselves were universally despised.

The early controversy over whether or not to build the Washington Monument on the National Mall.