Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the author of The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern ...

Elizabeth R. Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia, and author of six books, most recently Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the ...

Carolyn Barske Crawford is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Alabama. Chestnut Trees in Bloom, by William Henry Holmes. [Smithsonian American Art Museum] At one time, more than ...

Timothy Messer-Kruse is professor of cultural studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His latest book is Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution. Abbot Academy ...

Gabby Kiser is a PhD student at the University of Virginia, where she researches 20th-century American literature. Cinderella Tries on the Slipper, by Millikin and Lawley, c. 1890. [The J. Paul Getty ...

Conservatives in South Carolina first attempted to defeat the state’s new post-Civil War constitution by appealing to the federal government they had fought three years prior. A petition was submitted ...

Lynne Feeley is a lecturer of writing at Princeton. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Lapham's Quarterly, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Yet long before Washburn put a name to the obstetrical ...

Bronwen Everill teaches writing at Princeton and is a Research Affiliate at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past in the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University. She is the ...

The Resolute Desk at the White House during the Grover Cleveland administration, 1886. [Wikimedia Commons] Many presidents, including the current one, have used the Resolute Desk as their principal ...

Erika Pani is research professor at Centro de Estudios Históricos, El Colegio de México. Ruins of Mrs. Henry’s House, Battlefield of Bull Run, by George N. Barnard, 1862. [The Metropolitan Museum of ...

Philip Kadish is a professor of American Studies at Pace University in New York City. The author of The Great White Hoax, he lives in New York City. James A. Garfield, c. 1880. Photograph by Napoleon ...

While most Americans today would likely be hard put to name a modern-day conjure woman if asked, a caricature of one smiled warily at them from their kitchen cupboards for over a century: Aunt Jemima, ...