Many Americans felt the U.S. had failed to live up to its ideals on its 200th anniversary. They hoped it might improve by the Declaration’s next big celebration.

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 ...

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 ...

"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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Well, the main reason, obviously, is that you are not reading him. Although he has at least one admirer, most reasonable people stopped doing that quite some time ago. I was the first person to ...

Thomas Cahill, a multilingual scholar who wrote a surprise 1995 best seller demonstrating to the world how a small band of Irish monks collected and protected the jewels of Western civilization after ...

Marc Egnal is an emeritus professor at York University, Toronto. He is the author, among other books, of A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution and Challenging the Myths of U.S.

Claire Wolnisty is associate professor of United States history at Austin College. She is the author of A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South ...

Mark S. Byrnes is professor of History at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. Something remarkable in American presidential history happened on Inauguration Day. No, not the obvious one. The nation’s ...

Huntingon's #1 tourist attraction is its former Christian Science Church, now the Dan Quayle Museum, which also treats all vice-presidents in U.S. history. Sociologist James W. Loewen is the author of ...