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Featured Essays
The extravaganza celebrating the nation’s first century was the greatest cultural event of America’s Gilded Age.
At the nation’s pivotal moment — the Civil War — two seventeenth-century vessels kept sailing through the American mind: the Mayflower and the slaver White Lion. Their wakes still cut our waters.
Our Founders profoundly transformed the way people participate in government.
Congress forbade living persons from appearing on paper currency in 1866, after an unpopular Treasury Department official put himself on the five-cent note.
America 250!
Did Hurricanes Save America? | September 2020, Vol 65, No 5
By Eric Jay DolinThe outcome of the American Revolution may have been affected by catastrophic storms in the deadliest hurricane season in recorded history.
The Shots Heard Round the World | Spring 2025, Vol 70, No 2
By John FerlingWhat began as a civil war within the British Empire continued until it became a wider conflict affecting peoples and countries across Europe and North America.
Rethinking the Boston Massacre | Special Issue - George Washington Prize 2018, Vol 63, No 2
By Eric HinderakerIt is one of the most notorious incidents in American history, and also one of the least understood.
What Does “Consent of the Governed” Actually Mean? | Summer 2026, Vol 71, No 3
By Gordon S. WoodOur Founders profoundly transformed the way people participate in government.
“The Die is Now Cast” | November/December 2024, Vol 69, No 5
By Joseph J. EllisAmerican resistance to British authority developed with stunning speed 250 years ago in response to George III’s inflexibility.
Classic Essays from the Archives
Did Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson Love Each Other? | Fall 2008, Summer 2025, Vol 58, No 5
By Annette Gordon-ReedTo call it a loaded question does not begin to do justice to the matter, given America’s tortured racial history and its haunting legacy.
Growing Up Colored | Summer 2012, Summer 2025, Vol 70, No 3
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.The noted writer and educator tells of his boyhood in the West Virginia town of Piedmont, where African Americans were second-class citizens, but family pride ran deep.
The Day The Civil War Ended | June/July 1978, Vol 29, No 4
By Bruce CattonAt the Gettysburg reunion fifty years after the battle, it was no longer blue and gray. Now it was all gray.
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