The reasons for keeping funeral broadsides may have been genealogical: the lyrical remembrance of ancestors perhaps struck a balance between the heraldic crests found in living rooms across America and the magnetic poetry on the fridge.

Though it would take weeks to sort through the wreckage, it was immediately clear that the fire had caused casualties on a scale previously unimaginable.

Clay embodied both union and conflict. He had been the subject of political pageantry as politics and popular culture developed alongside one another in the early nineteenth century.

As we Americans acquired a greater share of the world’s wealth and power, we internalized the bizarre claim, loosely derived from covenantal theology, that God blesses our nation with exclusive fervor.

Next to Stephen Foster, William Henry Fry was arguably the most important American composer working before the Civil War.

Increase Mather’s primary target was “Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing” of men and women together.

Although the Shakers’ material culture has received the most modern attention, arguably the most vital facet of Shaker life was not the production of material objects, but rather the production of music.

In the two decades following the Revolutionary War, one of the most critical and troubling questions facing the emerging nation was thus whether Americans would enjoy the free navigation of the Mississippi River.

A more extravagant disregard for instructions on his second expedition would lead him deep into California—still a part of Mexico—and would win him not censure, but fame.

As much as Audubon drew attention to himself as an artist and man of science—and he did so ceaselessly and shamelessly—he also drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature in America, helping them see it in national as well as environmental terms.