How do we balance individual and collective responsibility for illness? This question, which continues to resonate today, was especially pressing in colonial America, where episodic bouts of sickness were pervasive, chronic ails common, and epidemics...

In "Urban Lowlands", Steven T. Moga looks closely at the Harlem Flats in New York City; Black Bottom in Nashville; Swede Hollow in St. Paul; and the Flats in Los Angeles to interrogate the connections between a city's physical landscape and the pover...

The popular image of a midcentury adwoman is of a feisty girl beating men at their own game, a female Horatio Alger protagonist battling her way through the sexist workplace. But before the fictional rise of Peggy Olson or the real-life stories of Pa...

Every day in the United States, people test their luck in numerous lotteries, from state-run games to massive programs like Powerball and Mega Millions. Yet few are aware that the origins of today's lotteries can be found in an African American gambl...

"She fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena; and the measure of success she achieved goes far beyond the credit she has been given in the histor...

Crap. We all have it. Filling drawers. Overflowing bins and baskets. Proudly displayed or stuffed in boxes in basements and garages. Big and small. Metal, fabric, and a whole lot of plastic. So much crap. Abundant cheap stuff is about as American as...

The Puritans of popular memory are dour figures, characterized by humorless toil at best and witch trials at worst. "Puritan" is an insult reserved for prudes, prigs, or oppressors. Antebellum American abolitionists, however, would be shocked to hear...

American soldiers overseas during World War II were famously said to be "overpaid, oversexed, and over here". But the assaults, rapes, and other brutal acts didn't only happen elsewhere, far away from a home front depicted as safe and unscathed by th...

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...

Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage – but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties".Liberty Power" tells the story of h...