Centering material culture when researching those with scant documentary evidence of their lives can help fill in the gaps of their experience.

With Force and Freedom, Carter Jackson makes a stimulating and insightful debut which will have a major influence on abolition movement scholarship.

The senators, like the grand jurors, knew their man, and probably conceded that Temple had given him the hiding he had been asking for. 

Studying the aftermath of the evacuation from Tripoli provides perspective on the current fallout from the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

By making pirate stories dramatic and exciting, Ellms transformed pirates from news objects and historical actors to distinctly literary characters.

Confederates’ quest for bones thus connects to a bizarre history of the use, and misuse, of human remains. Bones from the Bull Run battlefield were taken as acts of domination and displayed as trophies of war. However macabre, human remains became part of the deeply variegated material culture of war.

Does the creation of New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum suggest that race was irrelevant to nineteenth-century understandings of childhood?

Last spring, the campus I have called home for the last twenty years suffered an unprecedented act of violence.

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.

Union supporters created an “illusion of collective grief,” a perception that the entire nation—North and South, black and white—was unified in its response to Lincoln’s assassination.

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.

Ultimately, what seems to distinguish sacred violence from other acts of aggression is not its form but its intensity.

Attacks on Black Charleston worshipers started well before 1822.

Historical memory operates differently in professional military circles.

Bostonians of all political and economic factions came to identify themselves in opposition to the soldiers.

“[N]o matter how progressive, or how much it seemed to reflect a vibrant spirit of competition, of Darwinian triumph and bootstrap optimism, boxing still suffered from an image problem.”

A Historian’s Take on AMC’s Turn In telling the story of the American Revolution, academic historians and Hollywood filmmakers have […]

The gravestone surely served as a memorial for Desire Tripp and her family, but, as I came to learn in the course of my research, it also served as a site of local memory for individuals who never knew the family personally.

By the summer of 1881, news of the recently discovered Luray Caverns in Virginia’s famed Shenandoah Valley had spread throughout […]

Civil War Monuments and the Funerary Sphere In a quiet glade amid the trees and lawns of Boston’s Forest Hills […]

In violation of his own rule “ that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others,” Twain’s writings are full of the walking dead.

Constant attacks from weather, in addition to the mechanization of landscaping, conspire to destroy these stones as they once stood. Ironically, New England’s historic cemeteries are dying.

In this formative period between Revolution and Civil War the language of suicide became a conspicuous resource for the advancement of larger arguments about the proper balance to be struck between liberty and order.

Writing from Washington, where he spent the war years as a devoted hospital visitor or nurse, Whitman deployed his considerable skill as a journalist to introduce readers everywhere to the suffering of the hospitalized soldiers, focusing particularly on syndromes that, he claimed, were not well understood: trauma and its intersection with a wide range of disabilities.

Evocations of Survivance: Native Storiers in Word and Image in Remembrance of Sand Creek

While our own culture shields itself from the prospect of death, our nineteenth-century forebearers embraced it.

Beyond its contribution to Whitman studies and the history of both science and medicine, Tuggle’s book makes a profound contribution at the intersection of Whitman and disability studies.

What motivated Civil War irregulars?

Death changed America’s relationship with religion and philosophy, but the Civil War fatalities also created a new commodity: the dead.

Revolutions in France and Haiti, or at least antislavery writers’ use of them, hastened calls for immediate emancipation, the association of the South with violence and depravity, and the rise of American sectionalism.

Ammunition, Or Sarah Winchester, 23 Years Dead, and My Grandmother, Newly Widowed, Speak The men were paid extra: danger money. […]

Written to mark the bicentennial of Whitman’s birth, my poems operate within that lacuna, occupying the dissonant threshold between Whitman’s optimistic vision for America, “out of hopeful green stuff woven,” and my own personal history.

Research has been at the core of my poetic work for the past 15 years—largely because it gives me the chance to pursue questions of language while I pursue a subject in the world at large that interests me.

  Last Words of the Dying VI Listen! This’llhurt someone! Do not disturbmy circles. You can get morewith a kind […]

Imagine yourself seated around the table at a séance. Imagine having already committed to an ethereal mechanics of sympathy and […]

… when you visit Digital Paxton—which you can do from your desktop or your smartphone—you’ll automatically enter the introductory path.

“Convinced of their superior might, the British decided they could do as they pleased. After all, with the French gone, they were now the only game in town. It was time for the Indians to bend to their rules.”

The ruins of living beings provoked a twinned awe and horror at the transformative power of new technologies.

The new United States was born of a violent and sudden revolution. For decades after that revolution, the states, far from united, were an uncertain amalgam of diverse peoples, religions, and languages.

As Grasso explains in his introduction, Kelso became a “preacher and schoolteacher turned Civil War guerrilla fighter who subsequently became a congressman calling for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, then later a public agnostic, a spiritualist lecturer, and eventually an anarchist.”

Jill McDonough explores the pains–explicit and suppressed–suffusing early American culture.

If Jortner’s point is to regain the contingency, and peel away the sense of inevitability of American expansion, he leaves the reader with no real explanation for the course of events.

Assassin’s Creed 3 presents players with a large number of both historic and fictional non-player characters, but unfortunately the majority of these come across as little more than plot elements.

Lincoln slowly becomes aware […] that a titanic struggle is going on in the background between free humans and vampires.

For whites, death was perpetually connected to property and commercial exchange—yet another feature of a worldview centered upon economic transactions. For blacks, death became a way to create a culture that actually celebrated life by recognizing the interrelationship between the living and the dead.

In Remembering the Civil War, Purdue University historian Caroline Janney challenges the prevailing narrative of Civil War memory, which contends […]

Sarah Nehama’s catalogue In Death Lamented was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that she curated […]

For liability purposes, it is the sea that will kill you.—Pirate Captain, The Simpsons “In the beginning was the land.” […]

I’m not in the habit of reading my work once it appears in print.

Kathleen Donegan’s Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America is a powerful retelling of initial English incursions at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados.

Scalping survivors were visual evidence for the narratives the nation wanted to tell itself.

Misery is the new black.

Donegan allows us to see the settlers as a mentally and physically marked population.

How can acts of periodization produce historical frameworks commensurate to the vast trauma and shock of the Civil War?

How do we think about early American legacies today? And should we be thinking about them at all?

Since the doleful events of September 11, one of the points made by almost everyone, from the president to television […]

Domestic Violation, Women, and Remembrance in Missouri’s Guerrilla Theater The sound of gunfire cracked the morning silence. News that another […]

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson On a chilly weekend shortly before Christmas, the Stunning Significant Other (hereafter, SSO) and I took […]

Remembering Sand Creek, Rethinking the Civil War The runners were exhausted. Mostly young people from the Northern and Southern Cheyenne […]

The way Arizona Mormons remember their history, they were victims. They endured persecution and prevailed. From another perspective, they were aggressors.

“In effect, the cemetery becomes a history laboratory where students can chart and graph gravestone styles and inscriptions according to the specific increments in time in which they first appear, reach the height of popularity, and finally fade out.”

The anti-Indian sublime was as much about lambasting particular non-Indians as dividing whites from Indians.

Why do people perpetuate, by continuing to live within, societies in which violence, both threatened and actual, is a constant of life?

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Neither the movie nor Asbury’s books help historians in getting Americans to understand the true nature of nineteenth-century urban America.”

Brown, like Melville, gives the reader the impression that he is playing with masks. You are not sure which mask is hiding his true intention, or whether he has any true intentions at all.

During the Revolution, allegations of rape by British soldiers in newspapers and pamphlets were construed as attacks on American rights, rather than as the violation of an individual.

[T]he arrival of European explorers such as Champlain and even ostensibly peaceful settlers such as Penn set off a violent chain reaction among native peoples, creating a culture of warfare, which ensnared almost everyone.

Newspaper articles and editorials suggested that there was something morally improper about leaving so many thousands of bodies exposed for the amusement of urchins and stray dogs, or left to rot in packed trenches, awaiting medical-school body snatchers.

Pamphlets, plays, poetry, and periodicals overflowed with news and opinion about bloody tragedies, both real and imagined.

Kamil… goes against the grain in arguing that metaphysics, not skepticism, laid the basis for early modern “multiculturalism…”

Even on the old frontier, those who were at the top took pains to let everyone know.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The reenactments that run through and, in the end, dominate the film portray the Webster-Parkman principals and events through a gothic lens that does not so much resurrect the past as relinquish it to ways of seeing and telling adopted from Hollywood movies and stylish television.”

Only a year and a half after the fact, the rescue of Jessica Lynch has begun to seem like a quaint memory, as our attention has been turned from American captives to American captors, from Lynch’s blond ingenuousness to the scary hard eyes of Lynndie England and her comrades at Abu Ghraib.

Author’s Note: As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters […]

Author’s Note: As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters […]

July 29, 2008 Tennessee church shooter targets conservative historical fiction It appears that the angry white guy who shot up […]

“As I stood alone in the middle of Thomas, I conjured up the crowds that milled there in the weeks after the murder, hoping for a sight of the much-rumored Helen Jewett’s ghost. I didn’t see her ghost, but I could–almost–sense the crowd.”

“Compared with most heritage tourism, ghost tours—by turns campy and didactic—offer visitors unblinking and, no doubt, at times unwelcome views of the skeletons in the closet of early American history: slave coffles, Indian massacres, debtor’s prisons, and the sundry other sad and sorry fates of people you might expect would want to haunt America’s cities.”

Browse by Subject