In 1877, the American Humane Society was formed as the national organization for animal and child protection. Thirty years later, there were 354 anticruelty organizations chartered in the United States, nearly 200 of which were similarly invested in...

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. "The Nature of the Future" aims to rema...

Thomas Paine was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. More than just a founding father, he was a verbal bomb-thrower, a rationalist, and a rebel. In his influential pamphlets "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis", Paine codified both co...

Every May, a sea of 250,000 people decked out in red and white head to Chicago's Loop to celebrate the Polish Constitution Day Parade. In the city, you can tune in to not one but four different Polish-language radio stations or jam out to the Polkaho...

"A boy, he spent his boy's dear life for England". These words from a poem of 1916 were written in reaction to the news that a young boy, who had left Oundle School just two years earlier, had shot himself, whilst stranded in the Libyan Desert. With...

According to his kin, John Wompas was "no sachem", although he claimed that status to achieve his economic and political ends. He drew on the legal and political practices of both Indians and the English – even visiting and securing the support of Ki...

From the minute it opened – on Christmas Day in 1865 – it was Chicago's must-see tourist attraction, drawing more than half a million visitors each year. Families, visiting dignitaries, even school groups all made trips to the South Side to tour the...

How does a popular uprising transform itself from the disorder of revolution into a legal system that carries out the daily administration required to govern? Americans faced this question during the Revolution as colonial legal structures collapsed...

In the decades after the Civil War, the world experienced monumental changes in industry, trade, and governance. As Americans faced this uncertain future, public debate sprang up over the accuracy and value of predictions, asking whether it was possi...

For sale in CIS only! 600 million Indians, more than half the population, are under twenty-five. This generation lives between extremes: more connected and global than ever, but with narrow ideas of Indian identity; raised with the cultural values o...