History also changes because of strange, flawed, deeply human people doing unremarkable, tedious, and often boring work.

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

Not only was women’s and African Americans’ public leadership new and controversial, but also, well into the 1800s, Black and white women didn’t typically cooperate in charitable activity or reform efforts.

Brothel guides tended to be small, making them easy to conceal. They also mimicked other types of publications to make it easier to hide the guides’ true purpose.

In 1872, a small group of juvenile inmates challenged the terms of their incarceration, but even their modest success suggests the hazards of imagining children’s rights outside of human rights.

“When an AP story on an errant buffalo in Ulster County or a canine candidate for statewide office in Florida is not available, Sun reporters produce their own accounts of dogs rescued at sea or giant turtles recaptured by German police.”

When read closely, the 1670 deed challenges our tendency to see deeds as merely evidence of Indians’ capitulation to colonial rule.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Many who write books about the founders focus on mythic “character” rather than the real political environment, the nasty manner of politics.

Even as New York was becoming an evangelical power center, it nevertheless also remained a foil against which ministers committed to the New England ideal of village life—homogenously white and Protestant—could rant and rail.

In this wonderful snapshot of the relationship between economic systems and social hierarchies in eighteenth-century New York, Serena Zabin offers […]

The challenge facing New Yorkers in Columbia County was how to make the political order legitimate in the eyes of those Americans who either lacked the vote or lacked the right to own the land they labored.

I loved novels and short stories long before I loved the study of history. As a child, history came to […]

Baics’s primary concern is to understand the benefits and costs of public markets and their deregulation for the living standards and material well-being of all of the city’s inhabitants.

Common-place talks with Brian Murphy about the business and politics of early New York State.

After the provisions trade with Cape Breton had been reduced to a trickle following its prohibition by the New York General Assembly, the French enemy was supplied by way of the neutral Dutch and Danish islands in the West Indies.

Brian Murphy’s argues that the seeds of business corporations were planted during the early republic.

Freedom occupies a permanent place in our national consciousness.

Today it can sound like a cliché, but “follow the money” is actually pretty good advice if you’re a reporter […]

Like countless other men of his generation, Bullard began his working life as an artisan and ended it as a businessman.

The stereograph comes to America

Greenberg’s unique angle nicely complements the existing literature on working-class households and labor activism, yet it will simultaneously force scholars of the period to rethink their entire approach to investigating working men.

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.”

Here’s why I was holding back my experiences at the NYC tea party from earlier this week: The night turned […]

By broadening her narrative to encompass the wider urban context in which the trials took place, Lepore brilliantly reveals what theatrical plays men like Horsmanden saw, what accounts of other slave conspiracies they read about in local newspapers (most especially the recent plots and rebellions in Antigua and South Carolina), and how they regarded other faiths.

“As white fascination with black actors imitating white theatrical performances began to give way to the more racy thrills of minstrelsy, Hewlett found diminishing interest in his act as ‘Shakespeare’s proud representative.'”

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.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The design of the communion spoon and the silver beaker reflected the political values that held together the first British Empire.

Ghosts, [Richardson] argues, typically emerge from episodes of violence or oppression whose facts are historically hazy. In turn, the ghostly residues of these events are themselves unstable (or shifty) and can be easily made to serve a variety of political uses.

“If the many questions directed to a New York City history Website I co-supervise are any indication—including a certain befuddlement by visitors when they fail to locate information about events wholly invented in the film—audiences believe its story.”

“[I]n contrast to those who simply lament the decline of bourgeois institutions of public reflection (for example, the coffeehouse), Henkin puts forward a story about a public that succeeded–and in some ways exceeded–those earlier institutions.”

“What would it be like to step inside the memory of the diarist? To experience a diary as if it were a video replay? What would I ask an enchanted diary if it one day spontaneously responded to my marginal annotations?”

Why do history in the form of a comic book? Why use this particular medium as opposed to others? What can the comic book offer in the presentation of the past that is unique and compelling?

Death of a Notary offers a particularly good example of the possibilities of microhistory, although Merwick never refers to her study in those terms. Merwick’s careful reconstruction of Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam’s life illustrates the rewards of microhistory’s emphasis on rigorous interpretation of small details and small subjects.

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