Jeff Forret is professor and Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow at Lamar University. His latest book is Williams’ Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts (Cambridge ...

"Wabash Cannonball" is a light-hearted yet serious country-music song. It celebrates a train that went past my house at the southern edge of Decatur, Illinois, throughout my childhood. Maybe for that ...

Are war films ever true? The historian Norman Kagan introduced this question in his 1974 book The War Film, adding, “true to what?” Are they true to the experience of war? Are they true to history, to ...

Crystal R. Sanders is associate professor of African American studies at Emory University. In July 2022, just days after Americans celebrated Independence Day, President Joseph Biden presented the ...

On a chilly night in the spring of 1934, a 27-year old lawyer and future member of Congress named Robert F. Jones took a ride out to Henry Tapscott’s farm a few miles east of Lima, Ohio. Surrounded by ...

John Thelin is a professor at the University of Kentucky and author of A History of American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). In 2018, he joined with Patricia Albjerg Graham, ...

Montgomery County executive wants Rockville statue of Rebel soldier off lawn near courthouse In 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) put a soldier on a pedestal in front of the ...

Eric Eisner is a PhD student in the Johns Hopkins History Department. David B. Froomkin is an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center. The reigning mythology of the United ...

Rarely does a political scandal inspire anyone to discuss sociological research done 40 years earlier. But whatever else Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) may have contributed to public life, he certainly ...

Olivia Paschal is a writer and PhD candidate in History at the University of Virginia. Self-published in 1937, the year of the newly formed United Auto Workers’ successful sit-down strike at General ...

Jaclynn Ashly is a multimedia journalist currently based in East Africa who has reported from across Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. One of Gebremeskel Tesema’s completed rock-hewn ...

[T]oday let me deal with the hot modifier or intensifier before vote on Congressional and White House lips: up-or-down and its variant, up-and-down. Up-and-down, in the 19th century, meant ''plain; ...