For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images t

As her family traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, Mary Ellen Todd taught herself to crack the ox whip. Though gender roles often blurred on the trail, families q

Elizabeth Blackwell, though born in England, was reared in the United States and was the first woman to receive a medical degree here, obtaining it from the Gen

The New Orleans mayor who removed the Confederate statues confronts the racism that shapes us and argues for white America to reckon with its past. A passionate

When in the early 1870s historian Hubert Howe Bancroft sent interviewers out to gather oral histories from the pre-statehood gentry of California, he didn’t c