Walt Whitman

The eighth president defined the future of politics.

Trump's foreign policy is not as unprecedented as it seems.

There are uncanny parallels between the elections of 2024 and 1856, with one big exception: in 1856, it was the political left that was on the offensive.

The summer sport is facing big questions about how it will adapt.

Steven Hyden's new book about Bruce Springsteen's iconic "Born in the U.S.A" album is the product of a lifelong passion for the music of "The Boss."

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.

A new history of the Civil War and Reconstruction examines the ways in which Black Americans formed networks of self-reliance in their pursuit of emancipation.

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

Why have historians overlooked the connections between abolitionism and the famous New England cultural movement?

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.

The poet’s memoir Generations is both a chronicle of her ancestral lineage and lesson in the centrality of Black women to the story of American history.

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

The beloved musical’s creator struggled to find a place between left and center.

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

Hell hath no fury like a man with a vaginal douche named after him.

When the U.S. first encountered the “Aesthetic Apostle."

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

For centuries, settlers pushed Natives off the land. But they continued to use indigenous language to name, describe, and anoint the world around them.

Even after slave trade was banned, the United States and New York City, in particular, were complicit in allowing it to persist.

The story of America can be told through the story of its periodicals.