Many Americans felt the U.S. had failed to live up to its ideals on its 200th anniversary. They hoped it might improve by the Declaration’s next big celebration.

Claire Wolnisty is associate professor of United States history at Austin College. She is the author of A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South ...

The lesson of the 1712 Coromantee uprising was that a slave rebellion somewhere was a slave rebellion everywhere. It was the beginning of an age of slave rebellions. In 1731, a West African named ...

In the closing moments of the Super Bowl LX halftime show, Bad Bunny marched down the field naming more than 20 countries that comprise a broader, hemispheric American identity. Holding a football ...

Are war films ever true? The historian Norman Kagan introduced this question in his 1974 book The War Film, adding, “true to what?” Are they true to the experience of war? Are they true to history, to ...

The Trump Administration is using the painting to argue the founders were devout Christians, but historians have doubts about its accuracy. After a startling discovery about the historic conditions of ...

Edwin Black is the author of "IBM and the Holocaust" and "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race," from which the following article is drawn. Hitler and his ...

In December 2023, HNN transitioned to a new editorial model that centers on its weekly email newsletter. Each week, the newsletter serves up short-form essays to help readers make sense of the ways in ...

On a chilly night in the spring of 1934, a 27-year old lawyer and future member of Congress named Robert F. Jones took a ride out to Henry Tapscott’s farm a few miles east of Lima, Ohio. Surrounded by ...

Crystal R. Sanders is associate professor of African American studies at Emory University. In July 2022, just days after Americans celebrated Independence Day, President Joseph Biden presented the ...

Emma Maggie Solberg is an associate professor of medieval English literature at Bowdoin College in Maine. She has published on bookworms, the Virgin Mary, and poetry. She is at work on a new project ...

Caroline Wazer is a writer, editor, and translator based in Central New York. She has written for outlets including Lapham’s Quarterly, The Atlantic, and Atlas Obscura. Samuel Pepys, by John Hayls, ...