American history

America turns 250 this July 4 and the history books got the date wrong

A tribe sold 25,000 acres for 30 blankets. The land remembers.

Small-Town Pharmacies Didn’t Just Close They Were Slowly Legislated Out of Existence

The Forgotten Legal Battle Over a Town That Wanted to Stop Existing

The telephone switchboard was a perfect machine. That’s exactly why it had to die.

The 1950s Mississippi Delta Had a Parallel Mail Network That Federal Records Don’t Mention

Why every American grocery store looks almost exactly the same

Historians Say This Old Land Deed Changes Everything About Coastal Property Rights

Why Every American Library Has That Same Grand Entrance

The Tiny Texas Towns That Said No to the Confederacy And Paid a Brutal Price

The nurse who quietly stopped New York’s last smallpox outbreak

The prisoner who redesigned the jail holding him

What your great-grandmother’s corner store knew about money that Wall Street didn’t

The Navy built a fake city in California to fool enemy

What really happened to Times Beach: the federal buyout that erased a town from the map

The wartime order that stripped 120,000 Americans of their homes, their rights, and nearly their history