The Columbian Orator Taught Nineteenth-Century Americans How to Speak

For strivers like Lincoln, guides to rhetoric had a special currency in the nineteenth century.

September 17, 1787: A Republic, If You Can Keep It (U.S. National Park Service)

Timothy Snyder on How the Collapse of the Soviet Union Took America By Surprise

In the language of physics, a bell that hangs on a post on a farm is in equilibrium: the force of gravity pulling it down is matched by the force of the ground pushing back on the structure. Gettin…

MSN

America's Oldest Board Game Teaches 19th-Century Geography

Travelers’ Tour Through the United States was published in 1822.

America’s War on Theater | Los Angeles Review of Books

Daniel Blank reviews James Shapiro’s “The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War.”

The Erie Canal: The manmade waterway that transformed the US

Two hundred years ago, it helped spread people, ideas and goods across the US. Now, it's become a paddler's paradise with more than 700 miles of continuous, navigable waterways.

How the Rise of the Camera Launched a Fight to Protect Gilded Age Americans' Privacy

Early photographers sold their snapshots to advertisers, who reused the individuals' likenesses without their permission

'It's a brave new life': How an intrepid New Jersey couple survived the Alaskan wilderness on a homestead

In this BBC archive clip from 1962, Alan Whicker meets the adventurous New Jersey couple who chose to tough it out in the Alaskan wilderness in a new life as homesteaders.