In 1874, Jupiter Gilliard, who had been enslaved before emancipation, purchased 476 acres of coastal Georgia soil near rural Brunswick. That act of ownership rooted his descendants in the land they ...

One of my pet peeves is getting solicited for campaign cash by a candidate for office—especially federal office—only to find out that said candidate’s website has no issues page. The art of ...

The morning after the U.S. bombed Iran on June 22, I visited the megachurch that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth once attended in Lino Lakes, Minnesota. Hegseth is an outspoken Christian Nationalist ...

This is the second story in a two-part series on the public history of trees, centered on the essay collection Branching Out: The Public History of Trees. Read the first part here. Until the 20th ...

The slim, long-legged bobcat rested quietly in her leafy enclosure at the Ohio Wildlife Center, in rural Powell, Ohio. Occasionally she yawned, groomed her paws or walked along a thick branch ...

“You are forbidden to go to Old Hickory,” Brian Dempsey’s mother told him as a child in the Mississippi Delta. So, of course he went—though not right away. He describes Old Hickory as “an island of ...

On a sunny day in late April, Barbara Damrosch, 83, stepped into boots and out the back door into the stone courtyard of her home in Brooksville, Maine. Thyme crept over the tidy rock pathways and ...

Thomas Tweed’s transformative new history, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History (Yale University Press), begins and ends in the same place: a farm outside of Waco, Texas, where in ...

Visit a dairy farm anywhere in the country and odds are decent you’ll overhear conversations in Spanish. Like other farmers in the United States, dairy farmers rely on immigrant laborers from Mexico ...

The following is an excerpt from Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America by Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, published by Island Press. You can purchase a copy here. Brenda ...

On the day of his inauguration, President Donald Trump claimed his administration would end the “censorship of protected speech.” But actions speak louder than words. Thanks to a leaked email memo, we ...

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend ...