While we strive to approach our discipline objectively—to maintain distance—we also want to bridge the gap between ourselves and the past. We want to understand it, to feel it, and distance makes that empathy difficult.

William Cronon presents in Nature’s Metropolis an assertion of the fundamental interconnectedness of the city and the countryside. This is figured in the history of Chicago, primarily in the nineteenth century, as the city grew from the commodification of the produce of its rural environs.

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama?

But the nature of woman’s role in the destiny of expanding America, for Farnham, presented its own dilemmas. What exactly is required of Woman to take up this profound, national responsibility?

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

“For most of the twentieth century, the actual year of the founding of Santa Fe was a matter of historical speculation, and the name of its founder, Juan Martinez de Montoya, has only recently been accepted by scholars.”

Our historiographical queries pushed our scientists to think through the meaning and implications, not merely of current scientific consensuses, but also of past ones.

It is exceedingly difficult to trace women, but particularly non-elite women of color, through the sources that are available.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

How did the returned gaze of Chinese laborers function in relation to envisioned awareness of industrial speed?

“A garden of medicinal flowers…” “Cake!” Such answers help insofar as how many days were you a child? Or can […]

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

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.”

Putting the French in their rightful place in American history, Gitlin insists, requires “put[ting] Parkman behind us.”

On Finding the Earliest Known Poem by John Rollin Ridge, the First Native American Novelist I sometimes think that I […]

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Standing alongside the heroic and saintly Serras of the Capitol and the Catholic Church is a villainous Serra with the worst features of Christopher Columbus, a man whose own life story is overshadowed by everything he has come to embody and symbolize to his detractors.

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

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s bloody fourth year, it is perhaps appropriate to ask: […]

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Even before the confirmation of the gold discoveries—or simultaneously with the confirmation—the French began to think about the significance of California as an American possession.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

“Visions of ineffable beauty and harmony, health and exhilaration of body and soul, and grand foundation lessons in Nature’s eternal love, are the sure reward of every earnest looker in this glorious wilderness.”—John Muir

Everything seemed blasted by a new, blank enormity. The world was too big to be beautiful.

In the 1820s, the idea of the traveler was in flux, a category that had come to encompass every itinerant from Joseph Banks, science officer of the Endeavour, to British lads on vacation.

By the turn of the twentieth century, thinking about American Indians had become integral to German culture.

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

Indians looked on landless and drifting sailors, existing outside of the kin relations that defined Illahee, with suspicion. Yet through prostitution, intermarriage, working together, and trade, the fragments of a colonial society were formed that did not privilege the American vision of Oregon.

Los Angeles mirrored itself—magical and ordinary, artificial and real, blessed and damned—a dialectic of promotion that suited this prototypical culture industry, invoking truth and falsity…

A mere four hundred British families applied to live for three months in London’s retrofitted 1900 House, but nearly ten times as many Americans are seeking to live for twice as long in the far more physically grueling Frontier House.

In late December 2001, my husband Mark, kids Lily, Max, and Sam, and I were at the end of a […]

Calloway introduces the reader to the most up-to-date findings and interpretations in archaeology, but orients his own analysis around the theme of movement.

“Young readers travel into the world of books with little or no luggage. They generally don’t have prior knowledge of the times.”

“Kukla situates the purchase in the context of a fragile American union, impetuous western settlers, and calculating New England politicians.”

“If, as Jennings argued, Parkman offers bad history, then why plow through thousands of pages of the stuff?”

“Why this judgment about whether or not the participants really lived the life of 1883 homesteaders? Is the experiment a success if they feel as though they were homesteading or only if they convince the experts that they’d worked hard enough to survive the winter?”

For historians, perhaps the bottom line is whether one learns well or badly from a novel. Is Harrigan’s The Gates of the Alamo a good teacher about Texas in the mid-1830s?

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